OPENING IN THE VOID (smile)

... so much for the Foley Plan to make of this or any prison a home some know exists already of all men’s skills, the closet priest, the born brewer; shirtmaker, teacher, lawyer, Indian; singer, woodworker, Houdini, machinist, interior decorator (the guard beat up for hanging a "hanging" across his cell’s pillared front), the printer and the plumber, postman, nurse, angel, mason, and their comrade green thumb and let’s not leave out the economic mind who got us here (smile) bartering equalities for a family so open-ended, Jim, that Maximum Security withers away like memory of a den of guards, while ploughing its way outward to market surplus fertilizer, knives-forks-spoons-plates, vibes, vintage, fabric, and ideas from such soil of Inside Energy that where we have builders we will have architecture, where lawyers arise judges will be needed, and where green thumbs, another land. And what is your story? someone interrupts. What did you do to end up in this endless community of minds? I sometimes hear angels talking talking talking nearby and all they want is to be like us and live only inside our limits, change their lives.

But so much for the Foley Economic Plan to best use this Maximum Security Facility: the walled garden unfortunately for the time being notwithstanding is outside the walls: while inside them, Jim, growing pain goes down with any beans, canned corn, rice pudding, any milk you had in mind to be thrown up if desired in reverse menu a la the raw diet guru woman one day visited from New York City with outlandish sex shit so that I have to forget I first heard of her from your fellow prison-visitor the generous South American gentleman whose wife knows her from women’s workshops I could see my Miriam attending once upon a time in order to help herself get over me. Tell me a story, George, she said, hey Foley tell me something, anything.

Or pain is messages (believe a well-known dentist, who should be exposed for practicing without Novocaine so as to prove pain is) "nothing but messages": or was it Novocaine he was drilling for?, but the message I never got answered from the light of my life?—if she can’t get back to me it’s her choice though I am always with her (tough luck, dear Miriam; tough luck, Mir’): though not all inmates here know Getting Through is what this place is all about, getting not out but through to me and you (for James you too, give or take certain Cubans resident here, could be in danger) getting through at that special speed of Earth I learned and from no book—just the speed our light is slowed suddenly, bent by oil slick, blown glass, intriguing haze, eyeball, juice, gray matter, blood, sweat, or sea that that light falls into yet is not lost; or air: remember the grasshopper that landed on the biologist’s deck three hundred seventy miles from land? what air did it travel through?

Which isn’t your facts of prison life immortalized by girl sports writer that made research visit here to check out a black basketball joust in the yard and wound up giving us (surprise, surprise) the complete treatment: smells of clean steel and surplus soap, the hawk-song pigeon-voices, nutritional strategy, educational programs (if not the amazing chemistry that brought you here), license plates she had to touch like Braille, painting by the numbers on glass that some here learn, under-the-bunk postcard sales depicting our seldom-used sacrifice chapel, the individualized mail privileges too complicated for words, the resident writers, the guards’ blue blazers, the physical jeopardy step by step, the Rican family picnics (‘‘festivals"), the death-row chaplain’s safety-valve seminars but not the guru woman’s one-shot sex and diet rap, the Box Efrain did his farewell solo in for redecorating his cell—all data, from the dimensions of cells and inmates to rising cost per unit-con; all specifics from Anatomies of Anger in her top-dollar title, clear into dreams slept through by inmates then gladly given up to be published under this girl sports writer’s byline though her younger, chess-master house-husband did a downside rewrite and typed it for her—yet this latest exhaustive chapter on prison life is missing what /, Foley, had to tell:

and this not just your George Foley Economic Plan (documented for the eyes of our generous Chilean gentleman by private mail drop so private Efrain the bearer didn’t even feel it happen on a city street corner granted swirling with hookers, tourists, beggars, basketball hoopoe-wackoes blocking all lanes continuing out into the night of a thousand whistles the game they paid ten bucks a stub to see refereed in the Garden—and other messages Jim some worth it some not), but a greater thing even than the Economic Plan her prison piece missed was no less than the Way, the Way which swirls colloid in all of us, her too, by which Way and Chemistry we Get Through, though those who have it may not know they do:

as I told our gentleman from South America when he headed south to launch the Moon (smile), who thinks constantly of that southern continent some here abscond to on their nightmares—while he heart-targets with dignified rage and noble economy of word "that former country" he called his Chile to a certain anti-Castro Cuban inmate who we hear though (what with their political differences) doubt he has something going with—i.e., beyond that generous gentleman’s human interest, which you said wasn’t news (to you) yet not no news which no matter what my father says is not good news, but what mail does my father ever get?

Meanwhile, in lieu of news, Jim, we have on tap all economic learning the generous gentleman got out of Chile with, exiled from that stranded, coast-