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The Guantanamo inmates are writing poems, (why not,
guests also enjoy cricket, baseball and Irish dancing)
– putting it all down, with sharpened pencils
making marks you can see, on paper that doesn’t lie.
Despite all the free time, the scribbling is frenzied,
some detainees compose automatically, even in sleep.
One epic alone has a thousand stanzas and the writer
knows them by heart (they have never left the heart).
A few shorter verses have even been published.
There are boundaries to this generous dispensation:
prisoners are not allowed to communicate. The poem
must not carry a message intended for other ears.
This is too wishy-washy, let us make it even clearer:
a poem cannot be aimed at an identifiable target.
One opus has been intercepted and destroyed
because it addressed the writer’s mother: beginning
‘Dear Mother.’ Remember, these people are devious,
they do not know the ropes or understand restraint;
deceptive ramblings may contain hidden devices,
guiding the reader towards subversive meaning.
You have to know the code to see between the lines,
it’s a cultural thing and the hard pressed authorities
employ special censors, trained to spot clues.
Even here you cannot be too careful, who can tell:
perhaps some in secret are poems themselves?
It is hard not to be swayed by the power of words.
As a precaution our line-detectors and semantic nit-pickers
are relieved from front line duty at regular intervals,
to avoid battle fatigue: the possibility of seduction.
The prisoners are not as innocent as they claim.
Believe us, we have had to discover the hard way,
some poems are heat-seeking and know their purpose;
others step up, clothed in a bland conformity,
so you drop your guard and wave them through
only to find they carry a hidden payload...
There is an imperceptible pause, a nano-second
when you are neither hot nor cold; north, south, east or west;
alive or dead; before all becomes crystal-clear
as the words literally explode in your face:
or worse still, inside your head.
© 2008, Pete Mullineaux
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Pete Mullineaux lives and works in Galway, Ireland, where he is regular MC for the Cuirt International Festival of Literature, Poetry Grand Slam. This poem is from his collection, A Father’s Day published by Salmon Poetry in June 2008, which has been described by various reviewers as, “tender and lyrical,” “gorgeously resonant,” and “grimly funny,” and has drawn comparisons with Brian Patten and John Cooper-Clarke. Our Father’s Day anthology also has two poems from Pete’s book: “The Chair” and “Mowing.”
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