Notes from Exile: Barbed Wire
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
Prison camps represent the lowest form of security in the federal prison system. No cells. No towering walls. Often no fences around the camp itself. But at the camp where I served my sentence, a main prison sat directly beside us, wrapped in endless coils of razor wire that caught the sun by day and the floodlights by night. Threats of relocation there was a frightening prospect that fostered good behavior at the camp.
Every day I walked the outdoor track and looked at it. This journal entry came from those walks.
BARBED WIRE
Those gnarled circles flash their steel teeth day and night,
more frightening beneath the floodlights,
their true fierceness revealed.
In daylight they merge with sky and sunlight
and we forget for a moment.
Just a fence.
But early evening, when the lights come on,
those circles flash bright their unmistakable message:
you are a prisoner.
We are here to hurt you.
And you are not getting out.
Don’t even think about it.
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