"Prison Tourist"
I’ve stood within the walls of SS-21, Pnom Penh -
the old school in the crushing heat.
I've stood beneath a jungle jim turned torturer’s friend;
and peered at pots, once full of shit and piss.
I've heard they dipped unconscious heads in them.
That woke them stinking, half alive, for questioning.
Tell me who else is like you was the nub of it,
just put in other words and many times
before eventually everyone said a species of they all are.
In this way, while handing out the names of family members,
they maintained strange truth,
but I had no real inkling of their sorrow at that point.
I thought a while of when I was most broken,
then just shrugged. There’s no comparison.
The better cells have photoed corpses on the wall
I've seen the blood stains many years on.
Noticed how their toilets were small boxes
like old oil cans, rotted in the corners
like leaf mould or old corrugated rooves.
The leg irons looked millennia old
but not so heavy, not so difficult to cope with.
Still, a pain and barbarism of an elderly kind.
The smaller cells for ordinary men
and women, boys and girls, were
big enough for bicycles to stand on end,
but not on both wheels.
Peep holes built so would-be suicides
were scared to death.
Strange they did not take that fright.
They’d opened windows, could not simulate the darkness,
so we imagined and took loads more photographs
of barbed wire stretched across the open walkways
stopping mothers jumping off with children in their arms.
I found myself then wondering, did they hold them close
or toss them out to render death more certain on the way down?
I noted that, if they succeeded, a guard would also die.
I ironicised serendipity.
The galleries of photos, in the next room,
were poorly done (well in a way, by Western standards).
School pin boards, galleries of years just washed away.
The faces were defiant or just dopey.
Whilst I dwelt on one young beauty mostly,
indeed I can recall her now.
It was the ugly ones where tragedy was felt most keenly,
at least for me, and then it struck home:
this was a bit different from TV,
though I’d got a heroine clearly.
The staircase on the way back down saw
graffiti of the teenage kind.
A tourist’s wall of never forget,
Imagine’s lyric’s trotted out.
I stopped and hoped for some profound moment,
sensed something very large indeed
but suddenly felt less and less
and wanted to get out but not back on the bus
or anywhere else.
If I look outside now, very large indeed
is still there, but no clearer.
© 2009 Richard M.
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