Numbers

Sixty years in the Stir. Sixty years in the Big House. Sixty years singing Stephen Foster fables in a Sing-Sing cell. Six by Six solitary heart, teeming soul strikes again. A man, a bespectacled guard shived beneath his prison vein. Sixty years, released. Old, harmless, sent weary to rooming house bed. Sits and waits. Knife blade across shriveled, tattooed skin. Sixty years in prison better. Cigar-chomping, pork-bellied parole officer, sixty seconds to die.