Jorge Antonio Renaud Quotes

• “Prison Moon
  
  Four a.m. work duty and I begin
  my solitary trudge from outer compound
  to main building. A shivering guard,
  chilled in his lonely outpost, strip searches
  me until content that my inconsequential nudity.
  poses no threat and then whispers
  the secret code that allows me admittance
  into the open quarter-mile walkway.
  
  I chuff my way into another day
  as ice glints on the razor wire
  and the rifles note my numbed passage,
  silent but for my huffs and scuffle
  on the cracked, slippery sidewalk
  A new moon, veiled in wispy fog
  and beringed in glory, hangs over the prison,
  its gaudy glow taunting the halogen spotlights.
  
  The moon’s creamy pull upsets
  some liquid equilibrium within me
  and like tides, wolves and all manner
  of madmen, I surrender disturbed by the certainty that under
  the bony luminescence of a grinning moon
  The lunar deliriums grip me
  and I howl--once, then again, and
  surely somewhere an unbound sleeper stirs,
  penitence is dying a giddy death.
  
  I shake myself sane
  and as the echoes hang
  in the frigid air I explain
  to the wild-eyed guard that convicts,
  like all animals under the leash,
  must bay at the beauty beyond them.”

  Jorge Antonio Renaud

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