the cell

Bristol, 1978 for old friends

You know how to behave, having witnessed actors’ competencies

swear defiance or ambient anxiety. Your body feels so solid on the hard

rubber mattress. Night’s mouth rasps with snores and a dull heartbeat,

fantasy of light trickles from the city down through the high barred window.

An electric light stares from nocturnal habit, the only shadow

belongs to you. Elsewhere the moon, precariously suspended

is going through one of its phases. The standout feature

is the wall, slightly dented and multiplied by four.

Sleep is impossible so I try reading the thick creamy gloss.

The patina is greasy, stained with an explosion of ideographs, marks

and initials scratched by the incarcerated with tall tales of what they’ve seen,

toxic acts of cruelty or cowardice, anger or extravagance or drunken idiocy.

But the signs are scratched, the montage rubbed and pitted, you could stub

your toe on ‘the primacy of the imagination’ or a Rorschach test

(pronounced 'raw-shock') (now discredited). The air inside a space too small

is too thick for soundwaves to pass; language speech stalls and falls to the floor.

The poem offers what sleep could not, a passage out thirty years late,

even now the end spills light and warmth but its details trickle through the fingers

like dream, like future’s exaggerated presence, or the past’s for that matter.

“The patient is asked to list everything he sees in each blot, where he sees it, and what there is in the blot that makes it look like that. The blot can also be rotated. As the patient is examining the inkblots, the psychologist writes down everything the patient says or does, no matter how trivial . . . . A common misconception of the Rorschach test is that its interpretation is based primarily on the contents of the response - what the examinee sees in the inkblot. In fact, the contents of the response are only a comparatively small portion of a broader cluster of variables that are used to interpret the Rorschach data.”

http://www.rorschachinkblottest.com/inktest.php