I lock myself in

my solitary medicated confinement,

grieving Jekyll, erudite and calm Hyde,

and allow the room to close

around me, swirling like thunder

clouds, blackened and angry

but with the tinge of optimism

that the confinement will not last,

it will not allow the meekness of surrender

to bitter my experience,

for after all, the prison, the bonded jail,

is my own to suffer and nobody else

paid with their lives to see me sweat

out the pain of individual isolation.

 

Hollow incarceration,