Prison Song Sestina

more for poetry class. the sestina is kind of a hard form to explain. the end words of each line repeat, and there's a specific pattern to it, and you end it with what's called an envoi...yeah. here's my attempt. -g.

Prison Song Sestina

At midnight, out on the prairie,
the radio hums along with Johnny Cash,
singing lonesome songs of prison
and love. One hand on the gearshift,
the other on the steering wheel,
she sings songs she doesn't know,

but that, before hearing, already knew.
She is wrapped in endless prairie,
at the axis of a horizon-tinged wheel,
short on time, short on cash.
She wants the stars to shift,
wants to find a new kind of prison

to cover herself with. But prison
is only one word that she knows.
She knows the language of shifting
even on a ground as solid as the prairie.
Even when she's running low on cash.
Even when trying to stop the dizzy wheeling

of the horizon, the spinning wheels
of her car. She sings of prison
and of speed and booze and cash,
and Cash and Dylan and all she knows
of what her radio picks up on the prairie.
She knows it's time to shift,

to cover herself in fifth gear like a shift,
like a shroud. Knows that the wheel
keeps turning, that the prairie
can sing the Grateful Dead and prison
songs better than she'll ever know,
better even than Johnny Cash?

Cash with his sneer, with his faith, Cash
who sang her out of all of the shifts
she found her way into, when she didn't know
up from down or how to stop the wheel
of dependency. Cash who sang her out of prison.
Cash who accompanies her across the lonely prairie.

She slides through the prairie, murmuring Cash's
Folsom Prison Blues, shifting into fifth, dizzy
with a wheeling view of the stars she once forgot she knew.

[This message has been edited by gollum (edited November 05, 2001).]