Notes from Exile: Prison Verse
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
This week’s Log/Verse features the work of a fellow writer I met through the shared experience of incarceration. During his three weeks in quarantine at Lewisburg Federal Prison, he began composing verse on scraps of paper with a broken pencil stub—finding, in poetry, a form of endurance and spiritual release. His introduction and two poems capture the raw immediacy of confinement, the small mercies of human connection, and the search for meaning within walls meant to erase it.
PRISON VERSE by Paul Lubienecki
Poems from behind the bars and between the walls
From January 3 to January 24, 2022, I spent time in a six-by-nine-foot cell at Lewisburg Federal Prison in quarantine due to COVID. I was there because of my own stupidity. Originally, I was to be at the camp—a dorm-style facility—but COVID changed that for those three weeks.
I was scared, distraught, and stunned. Food—or what they referred to as food—came three times a day through an opening in the half-ton steel door. Three times a week, that door opened slowly to allow me to shower for fifteen minutes. Those were the only saving moments while behind the wall.
I slept on a steel-frame cot with a thin mat beneath me. The room temperature fluctuated from tropical to polar. It was noisy most of the time. Often it sounded like a jet engine racing down the hall. Frequently, the other “guests” screamed, cursed, threatened each other, or behaved like caged animals—for indeed the system and society deemed that we were, and so we deserved what we got. But many times I was thankful for that steel door; it kept me safe and away from potential violence.
The staff—if that’s what they are—looked like wilderness explorers who had never encountered civilization. Often I wondered who really should be caged up. I still debate within my wounded essence what value a vindictive prosecutor and a bemused judge thought that time at the “resort” was justified.
Within this environment—locked behind bars, surrounded by noise and disruption—I secured a mini pencil and some scraps of paper and began to write the verses that surrounded me. I continued this work once I arrived at the camp. These verses are about my psyche, the people I encountered, and a reflection of my life at the “resort,” as I lovingly called it.
A New Home
A half ton of metal opens slowly,
squealing with arrogance and malice intent.
Body, soul, spirit flee through the opening
as light projects outward—
the horrors of the high walls behind me.
Flee, run, escape—
but still an inmate all the same.
The nakedness of change:
orange to tan, not much of a fix,
still stained with guilt and shame and remorse.
A slow march down the hall to the camp,
an uncertain existence.
Vitality in question, life in question—
question upon question.
Anxiety, fear, guilt—
is this reality necessary?
Barracks, spartan, punitive.
Primitive eyes fixed on my disabling stress.
“We are family, we watch each other’s back.”
The voice of friendship.
I am a welcomed guest,
now part of a family of misfits.
Kindness, help, advice,
food and clothing shared—
the oxygen of the camp,
the code of life in a new world.
My past sins brought me to this day,
to endure the strife of this day.
How can I survive in this purgatory of the law?
Death is more treasured
than this life of living hell.
Get me through this,
oh God of my God.
Allow me to embrace my new family,
and one day leave to reveal it all to my soul.
Hot Shower
Droplets of morning dew
gently fall upon nature—
refreshing, renewing, restoring.
The rainforest drenches the earth;
its moisture continues the cycle of life—
the guarantee of hope and a future.
My thrice-weekly shower
in a stainless-steel cage:
hot water pouring over me,
guilt and sorrow briefly cleansed from the exterior,
the interior still stained.
The drain contains my cycle of life today—
refreshing, renewing, restoring.
Refreshing, renewing—no hope.
Refreshing, depressing—can’t cope.
Unclean, unclear, uncertain.
—Written by Paul Lubienecki at Lewisburg Federal Prison, 2022
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