Discussing the Circumstances behind the Murder of Elliot James “L.D.”Barkley, Inmate Spokesman, Attica Prison Rebellion, September 13th, 1971
“We are men, we are not
beasts,” he challenged Oswald to his face.
After cops rushed The Yard, they yelled Where’s Barkley?
then shot him without a thought after other prisoners broke
like china cups under the shunt of shotguns, billy clubs,
“beaten as such.”
Such bullshit. Stuffed in a Super-Max for a suspended license.
That man stood singly tall.
It’s true, “the sound before the fury.”
The Brother quoted Shakespeare.
What did they know?
Right lung sliced by a sniper
pig-like in a mask.
Have You Seen This Man? William “Taxicab” Allen, Murdered Inmate, Attica Prison Rebellion, September 13th, 1971
What can I google of Mr. Allen,
wrapped for 43 years
in the choke and smoke of a trooper’s revolver?
Did he have a daughter, a wife, a criminal record,
a life outside of jail?
His elbow is blown away.
We have been warned.
Within that haze
is a man dispersed
amid two million trillion billion atoms of gunpowder,
ignited and discharged. Somewhere in there
a man is running and raising his hands
as if for a ride honking, impatient at the gate.
Attica Prison Rebellion, September 13th, 1971: Even Though the Television Cameras Have Departed the Prison, Murdered Inmate William B. McKinney Still Has Something to Say: Let’s Do It Live!
You think this battle happened years ago,
but I speak for all of us – inmates, guards –
in saying the riot occurs today,
right now. I’m not some philosophical bullshitter.
The psychics can’t detect it with their light meters and microphones, so you’d have to ask my
mother.
Every word is a running man. Every period a bullet. The fists of dotted i’s.
You see we’re busted apart, curled like s’s before the boots’ mid-kick,
truncheons at the height of their arc.
Look hard.
See pickaxes in the t’s. A dead guard is the Y amid The Yard.
Do you not discern us wrapped in sheets of rain?
The bold thwock of the Army chopper, and all those e’s
grinning amid the fallen?
Paul David Adkins lives in upstate NY and works as a counselor.