Notes from Exile: No Forgiveness
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.
THE THINGS I DID
The first thing my lawyer told me to do was to write down the things I did which was harder than I thought and it seemed like there was no end to the list because I couldn't help but think about my second grade teacher Mother Mary Joan who made me write a list of the things I did before my first confession and I wasn't sure of everything I should put on the list and so I asked her to look at my list and she tore it up in front of me and my lawyer said that if I left anything out and the prosecutor found out something then I would be in even more trouble which confused me because what about every sort of untruth which is what we spend almost all of our life parsing and explaining so I started with the worst thing I did which so embarrassed me that I couldn't get myself to write the other things and do I count the bad things I did that were only to cover up the first bad thing which looking back wasn't so bad but once I did the first bad thing I had to do another to cover it up which led to another bad thing and then another until I had no choice but to keep on doing more bad things and when I look back I was just trying to do things so I could be good again which is what I was always trying to be but now I did so many bad things just to be good that I can never be good again and that's why Mother Mary Joan tore up my list because there was no forgiveness for me and that's where I am now in the land of no-forgiveness.
You can read more of my log verse, published in Minutes Before Six, a literary journal that publishes writing by formerly incarcerated writers.