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 just spilled out in primitive forms. These aren’t polished narratives. They’re hybrid scribblings of prose poems and stream-of-consciousness outpourings, meant to overcome the inherent ineffability of the penal experience.
They aim to convey a visceral semblance of prison life—its routines, trauma, and shifting emotional center of gravity. This series shares them as I first wrote them—raw and unfiltered.
Taking Stock
I’m sharing one of my first entries after arriving at the camp, when the reality of prison set in. It’s stream-of-consciousness, written in one long breath from my bunk—part memory, part unraveling.
I was born in a sanitarium in New York City but my mother said that was not what you think and I don’t know what I thought except sanitariums are not nice places but my mother said it wasn’t true and that was always what my mother did which was always reassuring me because nothing was ever really what it seemed when it came to me and what does this have to do with me sitting here in prison at age seventy-seven and I don’t have the answer except that I’m trying to take stock of everything and this is where I started or where I’m ending or maybe it’s just another new beginning because I love new beginnings and I’ve compiled them my whole life but I have a blind spot for the end of things and maybe that’s why I keep walking into mud like my father says or perhaps I haven’t a clue as if there are any clues despite spending our lives looking for clues and reasons when there are probably no reasons as we just do our best to manage the turmoil of our lives because there are no ordinary lives but I’m just starting to take stock because that’s what you do in prison and maybe I’ll find some clues.
Bunk 1, 5:15 AM