Notes from Exile: Life After Prison
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
Returning home from prison, the relief ends sooner than you’d think. The old failures still reside there, and prison makes the trip home with you. The following is something I wrote early after my release and while living under Home Incarceration—the most stringent form of House Arrest.
LIFE POST PRISON, STILL EXILED
It’s not like being cast upon some foreign shore among strangers and danger or strange landscapes. And it’s not even bad to be exiled — at least not for me so much as for my wife, which is typical of husbands who have failed their mates and continue to summon the same careless deference and selfish slights that border on criminality.
It’s some other kind of estrangement, an internal bereavement despite being in a pleasant place.
There is a relentless clock and mornings filled with frightening epiphanies. No matter your routine, or your stubborn refusal to break it, there is no path backward and no clear way forward. So we huddle inside a cocoon, clinging to the simplest entreaties and memories that promise some spiritual balm but never fully reveal themselves.
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