Notes from Exile: After Captivity
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
When I returned from prison, the paragraph below was the first thing I wrote after coming back. I didn’t plan it. It arrived almost intact, less like something composed and more like something recovered. It remains, in many ways, the truest distillation of what prison does to a person.
You can survive prison and you can recover from prison, but prison never leaves you. Prison is a kind of Dantesque dark dream, while the tactile world plays out in unfamiliar and confusing rhythms. I lived among one hundred other inmates that was more wilderness than community. There is nothing more solitary than living among the exiled. I entered prison a ghost and returned an apparition.
For readers interested in longer reflections on justice, incarceration, and exile, my essays are linked here at Minutes Before Six..
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An experience never leaves you. You write about prison. I say the same thing about grief. You don't get over it. It is part of you.