FREEDOM’S JUST ANOTHER WORD

 Copyright 2011 by Sam Yulish

Lamont Wilson, Ohio Correctional Institute,

waits in leg irons for his CAT scan results

at Riverside Hospital.

Various tubed patients on wheeled beds

pass in both directions.

Prisoners of a different sort,

they too daydream escape.

Wilson lectures the stone-faced armed guard on old movies.

He blames Bogart, Cagney, and Edward G.

for his incarceration and for planting seeds

of excitement and notoriety.

Wilson parallels his pre-prison’s day’s boredom

with that of Warren Beatty as Clyde Barrow.

As another old, dying patient is wheeled by,

Lamont envisions immobility–

and should he chance escape into a lonely world

of danger and flight,

or face the sentence of the uncommitted crime of disease.