In the months before my own capture, I spent some time in New Orleans. One day, for no particular reason, I went to the Zoo in Audubon Park.  It was spring.  The weather was perfect and children were running around squealing and generally having a childishly good time.  I was jealous and sad about my own miserable situation and I must have looked to the animals for diversion. I remember two things about that day that stand out.  I remember the cute little Koala bear did not look happy; he looked like he would rather be home.

        And, I remember the elephant.

        He was a very offensive elephant.  He was huge and smelly and appeared to be old with runnels of powdery gray skin, gravity bound and splotched here and there with pink.  He stood in his leg irons facing away from the crowd, swinging his head from side to side.  His trunk – the weight of it was striking and even dangerous looking - arced this way and that in a pendular parody of time’s passing, a metronome of insularity and repetition as he swung his head from side to side and refused to acknowledge the crowd.  He was insane; clearly a crazy elephant.

        He’d been standing there for years and years in his manacles developing a life of his own inside that big inscrutable head, and the outward evidence of his abnormal pathology was the steady rock and roll of that ponderous head dance – side to side to side…

        …just like Kelvin will do in ten or twelve years.

        I wonder what the elephant did to deserve his chains.  Surely it wasn’t three-million dollars worth of badness.  Probably only eight-hundred.  Maybe he introduced another elephant to a drug dealer.  I wonder if he was seventeen years old in elephant time.  I’m sure the man who captured him was rewarded with a bonus.  But couldn’t they have gotten some community service from the elephant?  Maybe he’s a nigger elephant and not entitled to that type of consideration.  He might have been poor too.  I could tell just by looking that he wasn’t governor material.

        These people who pass these laws and run this judicial system should be ashamed.  They should be forced to do three-billion hours of community service.  So much community service they swing their heads – the elephant wave to nobody – from side to side, forever swinging their heads in shame at their thoughtless acts.  They should feel it.

Shame should rain down in jingling, elephant bell-ringing curtains of ponderous, side to side to side to side, uncommunicative shame for what they do to the young in America.

        Words fail me.

The very end.