Notes from Exile: Before the Fall
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
Yesterday in Justice Notes, I posted the introduction to my collection of prose poems, A DIFFERENT KIND OF HELL. This week’s Log/Verse features a poem from the collection written inside a federal prison camp. Many of these pieces are composed in a stream-of-consciousness style — no punctuation, no pause — a deliberate choice to echo the breathlessness and relentlessness of incarceration.
BEFORE THE FALL captures the creeping self-deception and inevitability of collapse that shaped my life before prison.
BEFORE THE FALL
I loved my life in that pristine village of ours and the greenery of the backyard out the bay window of our bedroom when 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 I believed it and so we went on that way for decades while the creeping conundrum festered opaquely and I purchased one new commercial property after another so that the next one saved the other one and if that one didn’t then we would find another one that did until we had all of these wonderful properties that looked like a mini empire but were not an empire 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 more people go down with you and haunts you 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 while I’m still trying to figure it all out after nights of nightmares or wakeful lying in bed planning and plotting exits and tactics and outcomes and saving graces and last minute turn arounds and replaying turning points as if there are any or do they 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 purchase the collection here: A Different Kind of Hell.