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Under a broken umbrella

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I met him in prison.
Not the kind of prison with dragons or angels, just the usual one, with peeling paint, metal doors, and a smell like boiled cabbage left to cool too long. I was there during the Covid years, carrying pills and thermometers like someone delivering weather forecasts in a storm.

He was a poet. Not just a poet, a man who could write about a dead fly on the windowsill and make you want to cry for it. His poems were so beautiful that if you had read them on the street, you would have checked your pockets, thinking you’d been robbed of something. And yet, there he was, locked up, as if someone had mistaken sunlight for contraband.

He died in a cold cell. I was there. My colleague was there. The cell was like a refrigerator where they stored forgotten people. He didn’t shout, didn’t beg. He just whispered a poem, like someone releasing a bird through a crack in the wall.

That’s when I understood: poetry doesn’t always belong to the life of the one who writes it. Sometimes it’s like a coat found in a second-hand shop: warm, elegant, and smelling faintly of someone else’s dreams.

Somewhere, his last poem is still walking the prison corridors, looking for a door that opens outward.


I was not shaped by a mother,  
but by a wet curb,  
which said:  
“Take him, Lord, he’s no one’s,  
maybe it’s some kind of trick.”  

I learned to comb my sadness  
with a chipped comb,  
pulling out memories  
that pretended to be forgotten,  
but howled like wolf pups  
lost under no one’s sky.  

We were raised in an air  
that gripped us by the throat  
whenever we wanted to breathe differently.  
It is a prison without walls,  
but it knows exactly  
where you go,  
what you dream,  
and how much you fear the silence.  

Our bond was never a fairy-tale,  
it was a strand of barbed wire  
we crossed barefoot,  
saying: “at least we bleed together.”  

The streets?  
They gave birth to nothing.  
We taught them to cry,  
we gave them names,  
we showed them how to walk  
beside our hearts  
without stepping on them.  

The moon was not ours,  
but the locked one crept up quietly,  
put it in his pocket  
like a secret too heavy  
to give voice to.  

The sky turned dark,  
not completely,  
just enough for us to feel  
the collapse of a secret pact.  
We, with empty hands,  
learned to hold longing  
like an old five cent  coin,  
which we deemed  
worth more than any scrap.  

The light was not stolen, but saved from forgetting,  
a fragment of immortality  
that the locked one took with him,  
so we would not remain blind.  

And in his eyes  
something still flickers,  
not only pain,  
but a kind of broken desire  
that still wants to be light,  
even without the moon,  
even in the deepest darkness.

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Paul Bell

Date: 8/9/2025 1:51:00 PM

Every journey begins somewhere, good or bad. Sadly, the bad can leave an everlasting footprint.

Frederic Parker

Date: 8/9/2025 11:42:00 AM

reminds me of my youth on the corner of garbage and broken glass...two blocks from the dealers and pimps

Florin Lacatus
Date: 8/9/2025 11:51:00 AM

Welcome to Amsterdam