The Exquisite Prison Poem by Charles Chaim Wax

As soon as I entered
the Atlantis Bar and Grill
Lolli spotted me, took my arm,
and said,
“Walk with me, Bernstein
we’ll be like husband and wife.”
Lolli had loved a shoe salesman
for twenty years
without respite
and without
the possibility
her passion
would ever be returned.
We left the restaurant
and strolled on the boardwalk.
After going
a few steps
we came across
a yellow comb on the boardwalk.
“Do you want it, Bernstein? ” asked Lolli.
“No.”
Lolli immediately picked it up.
Half a block away
she spotted a dart on the boardwalk.
It was blue but the metal tip was missing.
Still,
the object found
a spot in the shopping bag.
Then she bent and picked up
a pack of cigarettes.
To me it looked empty,
but lo and behold
a single cigarette remained inside.
She spotted a plastic bag
skimming along.
In that went.
A shell wedged between
the slates on the boardwalk
seemed especially to excite her.
She knelt and tried to remove it,
but it was stuck in too tightly.
She rummaged through the shopping bag
coming out with a Bic pen,



no point,
and used that to pry the shell loose.
“Let’s sit down, ” said Lolli.
By now the wind was really blowing.
White caps formed
in the great distances of the ocean.
I said that I wanted
to tell her a story which would help her.
“If it is going to be a sad story, ”
said Lolli, “like the one you told me before
I don’t want to hear it.”
“I don’t remember which story I told you, ” I said.
“It was the one about the girl
who loved this man
for so long
that when she finally did confront him
in an alleyway
she didn’t even know that it was him.
She had gone insane.”
“You condensed it too much, ” I said,
“and you didn’t say
all the years she tried to be with him,
like twenty years she longed for him
and those years were ones
of unbearable suffering.
The unbearable suffering unhinged her mind.”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s hear the new one.”
“Study the waves
and let the waves enter deep into you.”
“This talk I don’t understand.”
“Each wave
that comes
to the shore is different
no two the same
which means
the past
can never return,
and you must be aware of this fact.”