Lines, long, sharp, short, stiff and stout, materialize every second in the industry called prison.  They are connected to all privileges for an inmate doing their time: a shower, a microwave, a yard phone, chow; the day of commissary, a dream of things missed, anticipated, dreaded. Even a dial tone yields a type of longing wait, how the monotone ring repeats a vibration on the edge of hopefulness that someone will break those eloquent trills with a simple hello. But days, the time counted and uncounted, also line up on a calendar: seconds to minutes, weeks to months, years to decades, a ghazal drilling its rhyme scheme through paired couplets, doubling on an expression severed from its whole.

Inside this perilous environment, aging with what surrounds me, I am a person convicted, a duality like a line break, but all the same to those who only see a line for a line. As I think about the similarity, I can remedy separation by staying focused in the present. I have to work through the stereotypical assumption of inmate/convict and not become severed by the days enjambing into the years, my sanity, the two decades, my life. Line? I've just begun to scratch the surface of a prison life which is now my poetic line.

To control pace and break, the space-beat of form, the poem’s essence has a feral nature that must deviate from structure, from what is truly supposed to be. My environment leans on my shoulders, urging me to wade in mischiefs, to feed the ego (which is the reader) in ways that could land me in segregation for up to 30 days. Staying free from trouble is extremely difficult, verse being free from trouble; it takes will-power from falling to that reiterated perception, the convict. How can it be that a line break is in control when chaos is the dominant subject matter? Does subject define mood or tone to a tamed lineation? Is a line truly at peace in its structure or simply perceived as tamed in its environment? To fully know the effectiveness of the line, the summoning it evokes through tonalities, I will have to understand the poem coming into itself as an entity, a dimensional variable unlocking from its own confined cell, which forms as a prisoner, the subject rehabilitation and education. The line exchanges the conventional to be a harmonic discourse, as I can only harmoniously do so much in discourse.

I can deviate from the poetic lineation, disrespect the unspoken rule by cutting in the chow line and still call it a poetic line. Of course, later, I will have to deal with the various meanings of my action and come back to the page that willed itself upon this earth. Immediately, things are unspoken again, or have made space for understanding. As I see it, I don't mind waiting in line as much as others. Feeling a sense of purpose as I shuffle to the end which will ultimately be the beginning, receiving or giving what I came for then off to wait at another ending which will be another beginning—it’s a perfect stress to a poem.

I wait for the small ends, quick unrhymed lines of five, seven, five, and sum them up to a whole big enough to exit out of—on the back of a notebook, maybe a chow hall napkin. But does it really end, this massive waiting and receiving?

My breaking point is like a line’s, a commotion of stressed urgency steaming like a kettle blowing over in pressure. The loss of family and friends, the separation from loved ones, a lover lost—I will have to take deep breaths, heave space and ease the tension of jumbled emotions.

In H.R. Webster's poem “Love Language,” in which the speaker journeys through a traumatic love affair, her lines are sharp and soft and wield meaning in the breaks.

...The knife is in the poem because you were pissed

I took the job at the factory. The knife and the board and the wet rag
holding the board tight to the stainless-steel table. A pallet of cabbages, baby

heads and basketball.

Although “pissed” ends the first line excerpted here, the speaker regains control in the passage with “I took the job at the factory,” thus defying and highlighting the lover’s possessiveness in the relationship. The “I” revisits vulnerability in love that makes the speaker’s rebel act sing. The knife, which acts as a symbol through the whole text, becomes this disguised interpretation in the distance. Not knowing about the knife’s intention in the poem, whether it’s made to cut the lover or the readers who learn about the lover, is a gaping wound that creates an unfilled space.

Spacing seems to say there are no rules now, that meaning is woven in the suspension of the unspoken, from afar, but if I go over the line, fall down to a new stanza, then I might just have to let meaning run its course, be wild as the environment has made me to be, just as the finishing lines of “Love Language.”

Step off

he says, and run the sanitizer for 20. You're a liability with that blade.
Don't you know the dullest knife is the most dangerous. But here you are, ruining

my ending. Showing up at my house unannounced with an eighth of weed, a ball
gag, and a bag of limes. Baby gets what baby wants. I say thank you I say

thank you I say thank you I say thank you I say thank you I say nothing
because your hands are in my mouth again.

Here, the speaker fights for strength, with a force of courage to speak out. Ruining/ my ending. Showing up at my house unannounced with an eighth of weed, a ball/ gag, and bag of limes. Baby gets what baby wants. I say thank you I say/ thank you… The line embodies the chaos, the dullest of knives made sharp as it’s forced to puncture the lover’s wilderness.

I think a poetic line forces its way, as I do to a 10 o'clock count time, lineation concealed in a book, me locked in a cell to preserve the temporalities. I am the written time in the most endearing quatrain; I keep it pulsing on to the next generation before I expire in this body. I am a vehicle of expression and when I reach the inevitable, my line break before another continuation, someone else will carry on a similar journey, that waiting and breaking at their point, that unwilling force, because your hands are in my mouth again. And to understand we must know, what follows.