Notes from Exile: Before the Fall
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 trauma, and more effectively communicate an inmate's day-to-day reality and true center of gravity. This series shares them as I first wrote them. Usually first thing in the morning before reporting for work in the kitchen at 5:15 am.
The one below emerged from the occasional epiphanies that arise in the middle of the night after the correction officer’s flashlight wakes you at three in the morning. It’s almost impossible to get back to sleep, and you're left contemplating the events that landed you in prison.
BEFORE THE FALL
I loved my life in our converted carriage house in that pristine village of ours and the greenery of our backyard out the bay window in our bedroom or some other color of another season’s magic when all of them were beautiful in their own way because our life was beautiful and only me to ruin it which I knew I was capable of but convinced myself that that was past and I was a changed man and of course I was because everyone was telling me that I was and in fact I was now a seer and becoming a legend and failure only a ghost I had overcome and of course I believed it and so we went on that way for years, decades even while the creeping conundrum festered opaquely and I purchased one new beautiful property after another so that the next one saved the other one and if that one didn’t then we could find another one that did until we had all of these wonderful properties that looked like a mini empire but were not an empire but together they hid the flaws because they were the opposite of the sum is more than their parts because the sum was less than their parts but I went on purchasing until there was no more purchasing to be done and then I started borrowing until there was no more borrowing to be done and then I started selling until there was no more selling to be done and my time was up and everybody fell with me which is the worst part about all of the purchasing and the borrowing and the selling because the more of it you do then there are more people that go down with you and it is them that haunts you because the web of them is so much bigger than you can stand so that the only way to survive it is to become vacuous and delusional which is what my partner said I was and maybe he was right and when I finally realized that the sky was falling and the world was starting to figure it out and pursued me day and night, there were countless nights of nightmares and wakeful lying in bed planning and plotting exits and tactics and outcomes and saving graces and last minute turn arounds and replaying turning points that go back so far that there were no turning points because they were just events leading up to the inevitable failure that was always there inside me and all of it was just forestalling and foreboding.
You can read more of my log verse, published in Minutes Before Six, a literary journal that publishes writing by formerly incarcerated writers.