Notes from Exile: The Roads
Log/Verse: daily reflections from prison, written every morning at my bunk. Part poem, part log book.
This week’s Log/Verse was published in Electric Literature last year. During my incarceration, right after lights out, I’d turn on my portable radio, and on certain nights, I could tune in to an all-news local radio station. The content didn’t matter, only its reference point: home, some place familiar, surprisingly comforting and painful all at the same time. Most of the time, the subject was the traffic report. I never thought it could mean so much. I’ve published it here as I wrote it, in its original stream-of-consciousness form.
THE ROADS
On certain days I can tune in a station from back home on the radio that I purchased from the prison store but only if I'm lying on my bunk in a certain position and tuned a certain way and the radio is turned upside down but it comes in just barely and staticky and intermittent so I have to turn the volume all the way up and I always seem to catch the local traffic report and how I'm gripped and uplifted by what was once dreary and dull reporting of delays on the Triborough Bridge that I crossed thousands of times or the George Washington Bridge and it's crushing merge from the Major Deegan Expressway that I always managed to just escape on my commutes and the FDR Drive bumper to bumper on all the north bound lanes every evening in my earliest working years and I recall myself stuck on all those highways from the Kosciusko Bridge after my first promotion and the Verrazano Bridge and its frightening length approaching from the Grand Central Parkway and the Tappan Zee Bridge and it's seeming fragile crossing and the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and its endless ramps and exits piled on each other and the VanWyck and its looming bridges to make you choose the Whitestone or the Throgs Neck bridge and the West Side Highway and its unmatched view of the horizon mixing it's woodsy feel and lurch of the forthcoming city crush and the Hutchinson River Parkway that was always the road home and commuting on the impossible I-95 in early morning and night after night so I could almost draw it's every mile and the ridiculous Long Island Expressway that just gets wider but never shorter and the dangerous New Jersey Turnpike and its profile of tanks and smoke that I drove so many times late at night coming home from the Giants games or returning from my sons' college or visiting friends and family and business guys south of the bridge and all those signs on it like the Lincoln Tunnel and Holland Tunnel and exits for Manhattan and all there the summary of my life and all its nostalgia that was wrapped up on all those roads from my mother taking me to the dentist to learning to drive on the Cross County Parkway with its narrow lanes and hitchhiking to school and to all those roads taking my kids to hockey practice and my daughters dance classes that are so far removed from the prison camp where I reside now in an unknown quarter of northern Massachusetts that I never heard of and situated on roads I don't even remember arriving on and only one local road that cars pass through every day with only silhouettes of the people inside but longing to be in one of them going somewhere or anywhere this road may take me and I don't even know its name.
Read the published version here: Dreaming about Crosstown Traffic
You can read more of my log verse, published in Minutes Before Six, a literary journal that publishes writing by formerly incarcerated writers.