(drip)
(drip)
(drip)
sadness lies within the cells.
it weeps and it wails,
jerks and assails.
it skulks and it looms -—
portending of doom.
it preys on dismay
and takes comfort away.
what a melancholy folly -—
this sadness turn madness,
this swooning of gladness,
this mourning each morning
in the dark dank cells.
anger is a denizen,
a blood-boiling menace in
the red walls that tend us in
the cells, cells, cells!
it rages and rumbles,
topples and tumbles,
cripples and crumbles -—
a conflagration of hell.
it burns ever hotter
as they teeter and totter
between irate and hate;
they wait for the date
when fate extricates
the soulless smoldering citizens
from their dehumanizing desiccative cells.
pain dwells in the cells.
how it dwells, how it wells —-
ever turgid, ever torrid;
ever helpless, ever horrid.
pedantic purgatory pervades
the populace's private perches
as the powerless public perishes
in the pallid putrid pogrom
in the pernicious presence of pain!
oh! how they writhe; how they die;
how they buckle; how they double, double
as pain rolls and cajoles,
doles out its tolls
on the persistent puissant people
in their deep dreary cells.
in the dirty, dusty, dingy, deadly desolation of the cells.
in the silence
(drip)
and the solitude
(drip)
of the cells.
-[sic]