Notes from Exile: Prison as Afterlife
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
Another entry from my prison journal. In prison, routine can become so relentless, and time so distorted, that the experience begins to feel less like life than something beyond it.
PRISON AS AFTERLIFE
Some days I think this is the afterlife.
Standing at the curb not too long ago, the traffic heavy and passing quickly while I measured the physics of the vehicles and their speed and their ability to take me out, maybe I stepped off.
Taking stock of this place, it fits: the strangers’ familiar but absent gaze; always new faces, coming and going week after week; passing in silence in the hallways and baths. Then someone new, with no notice of arrival, appears out of the blue, sitting next to you in the dining hall with the same sad story of injustice and fervent belief and fantasy of early release like all the others.
It never happens.
So eternity becomes palpable as you rise, torturous day after day, before sunrise, as if a divine clock has set the time so you always rise in the dark.
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