Notes from Exile: What I Keep Inside
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. I wrote the following entry about one year into my sentence
WHAT I KEEP INSIDE
Nobody knows what I keep inside. Worse yet, neither do I. You dig so deep in prison about yourself, you can’t get to the bottom. It’s like the joke in grammar school, digging till you get to China. Of course, it’s no way to get to China. And no way to get to your answer. Probably more likely to get to China than to your answer. Doesn’t mean you stop trying, though. You never stop trying. And that’s the agony. Because you find so many things you’d rather not find on the way there, but know there are even worse things the more you descend, and something unthinkable if you ever did get there.
You can read more of my log verse, published in Minutes Before Six, a literary journal that publishes writing by formerly incarcerated writers.