Behind bars

I always remember those visits we, my mother and I, did to my father when he was injustifiedly imprisoned during the last dictatorship; I was a child. There is a face I'll never forgive, a tough man with a beard, crying because I reminded him his own son. Who knows if he was injustifiedly incarcerated too, who knows if he went free, who knows if he died already, who knows if he went back to his son; who knows his name.

Fouad Al-Farhan was injustifiedly incarcerated too (left column), wonder who may be the next one incarcerated for blogging. Who knows...?

Frail friends, I love you all!
Maybe that's the trouble,
storm in the eye of a storm.
Everyone wants too much.
Instead we gratefully accept
some stylized despair:

suitcoats left hanging
on folding chairs, snow falling
inside a phonebooth, cows
scouring some sad pasture.
You know the sort of landscape,
all sensibility and no trees.

Nothing but space, a little
distance between friends.
As if loneliness didn't make us
responsible, and want accomplices.
Better to drink at home
than to fall down in bars.

Or to read all night a novel
with missing heirs, 513 pages
in ten-point type, and lay my body
down, a snarl of urges
orbited by blood,
dreaming of others.

William Matthews, "A life of crime".