THIS IS NOT ABOUT AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST THAT HAS BEEN DETAINED IN SYRIA FOR MORE THAN 90 DAYS!

This is about someone you don't know. This person pens accounts
of boredom under duress, when good people go deaf.

They lay tracks in a country where they don't speak the language
and are memorizing the customs. They correspond on the luck
of the draw when commoners start wielding golf pencils.

This person is no Sandburg, no newspaper muscle to flex.
No Richard Engel, with the full faith and backing of the
National Broadcasting Company. No, this person does not
even exist, they are beyond the reproach of existing.

They certainly have no teaching experience, don't know
third world normal schools in the first world, or pregnant
Puerto Rican pupils in Holyoke with no GED
baby daddy's thinking he can eat the world
with a brick certificate from the jail.

Again, this person has never lived next to you,
you have never asked to borrow their teal Accord
so that you can make more scratch than the U trickles.

This person has never written a novel about inmates
manning ginormous oil derricks in the Gulf of Mexico,
they are not adulants of George Saunders or Saramago
and they were not personally saddened by the fantastic
suicide lesson of the Lobsterman.

PARALAPANDA

mi Pandita
pienso el gamble
we took, absconding
from the penitentiary
of Manhattancito.

mi Pandita
my heart is a turnstile
millions of people
fighting each for other
a seat in your train
of inmates with color scrubs.

Pandicita, esto es lo gorgeous-
ness no hand to win no pot, no barrage
except your wildest fears made flesh
by the zangano in the crib.