Notes from Exile

Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.

Every morning, before work or count, I sat at my bunk and wrote what I called ‘log/verse.’ I didn't know iambic pentameter from a weather vane. Words spilled out in primitive forms. These aren’t polished narratives. They’re hybrid scribblings of prose poems and stream-of-consciousness outpourings, designed to overcome the inherent ineffability of the penal experience, convey some visceral semblance of the prison experience, and more effectively communicate an inmate's day-to-day reality, trauma, and true center of gravity. This series shares them as I first wrote them—raw and unfiltered.

HELL FREEZES OVER

I never thought that Hell would be freezing, not fire but ice the torture of preference for the Bueau of Prisons as you slept in overcoats and winter hats and shivering for hours tossing and turning your way to warmth and just when you managed to find sleep somehow, there was the three am count and the guards flashlight in your bunk and then another hour to try and morph your shaking into sleep and then the alarm goes off at Five am and it's morning and time to get up in the meat locker and you ask the guard about the heat and he tells you to "fuck off because all you guys are a pain in the ass “whose hot whose cold" and then you go to work in the kitchen washing dishes and scrubbing pans but at least its warm for five hours but you finish up and you go back to your bunk exhausted but still cold, colder even and ten minutes later your shivering again. A different kind of hell.