PICTURE it if you will.
A wan, half-starved Chen Shui-bian, former president of Taiwan, sitting inside Room No. 46 in the detention centre in Tucheng, in suburban Taipei, casts a weary glance over the books, paper and mattress spread over the dank cell.
Fuelled only by Gatorade and gruel, he jots down a love poem to wife Wu Shu-chen, simply titled, To My Wife:
"Layers and layers of bronze and steel walls,
A small and dank and dark cell.
A Black Prison which no warm sunlight can penetrate."
As his once whirlwind life slows to a crawl, he muses:
"Eat, drink, shit, wash clothes, shower.
Damp and damp again, don’t know what is called dry.
Whatever can be hung has been hung,
Can't tell what is dry, what is wet."
Time inside the cell is so slow that 13 days away from his wife feels like 13 years, he writes.
"How can I not think of her?" he pines.
Besides the shock-art reference to excreta and sentimental flushes, Mr Chen throws diplomacy (and irony) to the wind and asks:
"The former resident of Chongqing South Road
Is now the prisoner of the new president.
Lamenting the volatility, ruthlessness and darkness of politics.
"When has Taiwan become a backwards country in Latin America, Africa and South-east Asia?"
Ouch. When indeed?
By the way, that's a fine way to treat the 23 allies, mainly Latin American and African states, which Taiwan is still hanging on to.
Chen is hardly the first Taiwanese prisoner to pen books - his former deputy Annette Lu wrote a novel behind bars – but he has been amazingly energetic despite the low blood sugar as a result of his fasting.
Top law student in his cohort, first non-KMT candidate to be elected Taipei mayor and then president, he is also on course to be Most Prolific Tucheng Cell-mate.
Said to wield the pen like a man possessed, he has churned out another poem titled No Name, a memoir called A Dialogue in Prison and is halfway through another memoir which he has tentatively called Taiwan Independence.
And all on a half-empty stomach with no ghost writer on hand.
Each time his lawyer-publicist meets Chen behind glass walls, he ends up feverishly taking down his client's every word.
The poems have become a publishing sensation – with no lack of newspapers, websites and TV talk shows dissecting them and discussing his similes, allusions and metaphors.
You know, for all their merits or lack of, Chen's poems are possibly reaching a wider audience than the damp squibs who have rubbished them.
For sheer tenacity, audacity and creativity, few can hold a pen up to the guy.
Really.