assisted dying jolie prather There are no barbed wires here: there are keypad numbers green lights and weathered LEDs glued half-heartedly to brick We punch the nonsense in a thousand times    we get it wrong until finally                 they let us in It is like some kind of miracle now:        We are passing through purgatory        thick steel turnstiles and radio controls        dumb children too wise to walk away and never come back in to modern-day senility:        We laugh        telling each other telling me        telling them telling ourselves as we sleep that this        is all we have . . . Next to idiocy           Even the doctors and the dinosauric bones buried in bedsores believe it: Extinction is freedom! But it isn't extinction        it's redemption from some place some vast and empty space like        my grandfather's mind like        the house he built on 203 Pine