Just before my latest novel "The Road from Chapel Hill" was published, The News & Observer ran an excerpt. A couple of weeks later, a letter came for me stamped "Mailed at Central Prison." In the top left corner, a large round hand gave me the prisoner's name and his number on Death Row. Inside was a letter wanting to know what happened next, and would I write his story too? I went to visit, and then went again. Slowly, and with caution, inmate ____ and I are fumbling toward being friends.

He was an accidental package, thrown away

to float upon the surface of the world,

an obstacle, a mouth to feed,

the nuisance bastard of a rough man's wife,

a punching bag, a dog to kick,

a pale-skinned black boy good for nothing

but to shove aside, to mock,

to stare at with that hard and silent

slow-neck-turning straight-on stare

that sees so little and yet says so much.

An ordinary story his, the candied highs,

the Bull malt liquor and Wild Irish Rose,

the swift onrush from foster home to foster home

group home to group, as though he traveled

down a glass-slick tunnel with the four harsh

winds of fate exploding at his back,

his panicked hands flung out to seize

whatever shone along the way --

a TV set, a boom box, handful of CDs,

an apple pie, a pack of Joe Cool Camels,

handgun from his grandma's purse --

until he slammed, spreadeagled like

a cartoon character, against the tunnel's

silver-badged, blue-uniformed dead end.

And then the slave-like hobbles, lost-child mug shots,

and the prison label 'black,' ignoring half his ancestry,

the stunned astonishment at what he had become.

And after that, beneath a high, shrill,

ever-burning light, the long slow dirge

of days and years toward the needle's fatal,

sympathetic slide into his arm.

(Editor's note: Three inmates at Raleigh's Central Prison had been scheduled for execution soon. Executions scheduled for Jan. 26 and Feb. 2 have been stayed. As of press time, an execution is scheduled for Feb. 9. The inmate whose story is told in this poem is not scheduled for execution in February.)