Category Archives: Prison Letters

“The Race Unwon” and Other New Writing by “Conway”


My prison pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life at a maximum-security facility in California for receiving stolen goods, has sent me another packet of exciting new work this month:

The Race Unwon
by Conway

Like withered old leaves on a Hanged mans tree
absorbing the useless sun’light they save
to power only an abandoned memory
inside dreary chill shadows of his grave

with unquenching air recycled-n-stale
our sun was walled out of existence
unable to recover warmth from the veil
brought on by the shame of persistence

unnatural walls, kneeling left pleading
yet still a judgment remains sitting
among the rubble of babylons leading
thrown-up, jumbled enormous forbidding

In these volumes of created humanity
necromanced from the living dead
Baptized by fire with insanity
running cold as the blood being shed.

Chase me away from their stench
erase their stench from me
I’ve no more vengeance to quench
nor do I desire this bitter memory

though the waves still sing your song
over & over with pounding pain
those stone-washed kisses so strong
break on the horizon in vain

On the border this concrete grows
a burial ground for the spurned
as conspicuous injustice glows
gleefully while innocents burned

into my barbed-wire cradle I settle
as it winds-n-twines around twirled
trapped inside this thorny nettle
no sunbeam’ steal into our world

left abandoned we learned to choose
we allow nothing into our heart
sad but true, the worst race we lose
will be those we never did start…

****

Trapdoor

Our eyes have groped thine melted sands
us trees in the snow reaching out for warm light
suffocated by whiteness.

the Sun only dissolved the asphalt
reflected the concrete, crumbling like stale crackers.

All these faces tied together on the same chain
staring out through a teasing televisions lens;
A world of opportunity offered and taunted
without scents, never relents.

So close, but yet so far away;
This distant planet’s rebuked
by icy winds
forgetting their place in the pecking order
listening for prompts
still the only sounds offered
turned into useless static
untuneable noise, apologizing
for a despicable crowd’s opinion; wonder
about thunder’s irrelevance.

When the earth falls open, to swallow your soul
then, like a trapdoor spider
closes back up to hide the hole…

****
In the Chalk

I never liked the chalk board in school
it reminds me of another day
when my sister went away
they called her JANE DOE
because no one claimed her body when she died
But, I was there that day
it was the last time I cried

You see this woman had a future growin’ up
but now that’s all in the past
she grew up in the ghetto some say way too fast

At first she went to church
it gave her proper focus as she excelled
when situations became tough she hardly made a fuss
from the madness she rebelled

All the players in the hood kept missin’
whenever they tried to get at her
and though their game was tight
to her they didn’t matter

but as the years went by
her attitude began to change for the worse
her demeanor decomposed, and
she started dressing like a tramp and began to curse

she put her pops to shame
and started getting passed around a lot
so he blamed it on our mom, said it was her fault
for all the slutty clothes she had bought
“just look at how the girl walks
and God have mercy the way she talks”
she’s only just a child and already got a kid
you can’t blame it on the daddy
it must be something the momma done did

They both knew her life was in danger
when she started walkin that walk
but never thought the day would come
they’d find her in the chalk

I found her outline that night
on the corner of our street
under a streetlight where all the gangsters meet

I snuck out of the house
and watched them take the yellow ribbon down
when those cops cars rolled away
I approached the spot with a frown

That chalk told a story of an empty death
of someone all alone
an angry pool of blood was in the chalk
when I saw it I started to groan
I fell to my knees and started to cry
I looked up in tears and asked “God O why”

Why sister did you have to leave
you told me God was just, you made me believe

My tears were falling in the chalk
as I lay in her last place
then the sky burst open and lightning flashed
I looked up and saw her face
there were tears in her eyes
as she looked down on me with a smile
then the rain washed the chalk and blood off the sidewalk
I followed it for a while

down the gutter it went and finally to a drain
and when it disappeared
I swear I felt my sister’s pain

When I graduated college
I came back to pay her a last visit
I sat down by the drain pulled out my diploma
I graduated sister this is it

I couldn’t hold it in no more
my tears started falling
they fell into the drain and I swear
I heard my sister’s voice to me calling

She told me she was happy
I grew up to be an honest man
“keep working for the future do right the best you can”

Just remember one last thing
“talk is only talk”
you can always walk away
don’t end up in the chalk…

****

Notwithstanding the above poems, Conway also has a comic side, as in this recent exchange from our letters. On Nov. 3, I wrote:


With the advent of cold weather, squirrels have invaded the roof above our bedroom. It’s amazing how much noise they can make, considering their size. It sounds like a hockey game up there. Adam tried throwing pepper in the hole (he even had the carpenter cut a little door in the wall for this purpose), then hanging an inflatable owl off the dining-room window, and now we have the bedroom computer playing owl-sounds all day. Whoo whoo! Whacka whacka! As of today, the roof-repair guys are finally here to patch the hole, so the exterminator can come and not worry that the critters will get back in as soon as he leaves. The rule is that if he catches them alive, he either has to kill them or release them on our property—too bad, because I can think of a few people to whom I’d like to deliver a sack of live squirrels.

He responded on Nov. 27 with the following anecdote:


A friend of mine got the shaft on a business transaction. She was not able to physically recoup her losses and law enforcement was out of the question, if you know what I mean. So, homegirl goes down to the pet store and buys $40 worth of crickets, then she buys 5 Hefty trashbags full of packaging peanuts. Enters the domicile of the party and dumps crickets & nuts all over the building. Chirp! chirp! yee haw!

“Once Again” by “Conway”

 

“Conway”, my pseudonymous correspondent at a maximum-security prison in central California, has gone another round in our poetry war with “Once Again”, a response to my poem “A Difference of Opinion”, which was itself inspired by Stephen Dobyns’ “Artistic Matters” from his 1996 book Common Carnage. And the beat goes on…

A Difference of Opinion
by Jendi Reiter (1996)

Once there was only the mud
and one-celled things with just enough 
    purpose
internal to themselves to be alive,

but too soft to fossilize, leaving no trace
of themselves in history except the evolved 
    pattern
for whose sake billions of them were flung away 
    by nature

like soldiers or confetti.
Finally the moment came
when they began to prey upon one another,

cell against cell, and only then
did nature sit back in satisfaction
to watch the sharp beauty of spikes grow,

the monumental callousness of armor,
the cunning of hooks, all the hard immortal 
    variations
that make scientists exclaim, “Wonderful life

in which there are so many things to study!”,
as Cain’s children cried,
those founders of music and brass and 
    iron artifice.

To be a predator is to know many things.
The prey knows one big thing: how to run.
From this single-mindedness the idea of 
    purity grew.

That took care of us for centuries.
Now we know only many little things again,
but purity makes us fear to let them collide.

For nature, who fears no decisions,
the purpose of difference is war.
The best head may arise,

a brighter feather, a harder hand.
Of all the newborn spiders casting their threads 
    on the wind
a few survive, the rest are birds’ food and 
    dust.

The purpose of speech is hesitation.
Even utopias can’t be discussed
in case the lion and the lamb

have a difference of opinion,
the lamb feeling entitled to a paradise of 
    its own
where it needn’t pretend to forgive

the lion, who simply wants to go on
being haughty and idle and unshaven.
That black fly keeps buzzing and banging against 
    the window

of your study, disturbing the reasoning
of the opinions you’re writing. What keeps you
from crushing it with your thumb?

###

Once Again
by Conway (2007)

An Amoeba brought forth a cure
the lure of life, end of boredom
from the dull lull of granite.

Then, incontent to be alone
it detached, dated itself (literally)
connections were made, to be broken

leaving a token to share, or
care for, when splitsville came.
For shame! could this be incest?

We detest the word, action
but that bird, those bees, flowers
trees all carry the same obnoxious disease.

Life, O’so simple the sound
that separates us from dirt
the ground that becomes granite.

Is this all we can expect of our planet
or will we be separated again
like an amoeba to begin

a separation nullified
the preparation multiplied, infin.;
to be tossed in a soup

as the stomach turns, churns
“these are the days of our lives”
brought to you by, our sponsor.

That all mighty amoeba, he who
she do — always leave you
alone to split, then spit again

on the hand that feeds
or lonely heart that pleads
bleeds the land then leaves

a mess, of amoeba bodies strewn
behind the trail instead, wed
as earth swallows up her dead.

So now you see, the dirt
is not so boring as once thought
for here the granite’s caught

feeding while it sleeps
seeding though life weeps
through the soil of earth.

We find nature in this story
the glory of our planet
from the dull lull of granite…

Book Notes: Couldn’t Keep It to Myself


Bestselling author Wally Lamb led me to some crucial insights about self-acceptance, forgiveness and gratitude with his novels She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True. Now, in his role as writing workshop leader at a women’s prison, he’s empowered some forgotten and outcast members of our society to understand how they became who they are, and to make the rest of us recognize our common humanity. Couldn’t Keep It to Myself is the first collection of autobiographical essays by Lamb’s students at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. The sequel, I’ll Fly Away, was just released.

Emotionally, this book is a hard read because of the numbing similarity of their traumatic pasts. The women’s voices, however, are fresh and individual, even humorous at times. Childhood sexual abuse is virtually universal, and the pattern is often repeated in their adult relationships. Several of the authors finally struck back against men who were abusing them or their children, yet received life sentences despite their status as battered women, due to poor lawyering or prejudiced judges. Small moments of hope and resistance shine out as all the more precious, such as Bonnie Foreshaw’s fight for a religious exemption that would let her wear a skirt instead of pants with her prison uniform.

The authors never deny responsibility for their crimes nor plead victimhood as an excuse to escape punishment. What their stories reveal, however, is that they are real, complex people, not reducible to their worst act (as Sister Helen Prejean would say), who are often enduring far harsher sentences than the facts seem to merit. Given the deprivations of their early lives, talk of “coddling” prisoners with educational programs and other rehabilitation opportunities is ridiculous. They are only being given, for the first time in their lives, opportunities for self-understanding and dignity that most of us take for granted.

Apparently these ideas were too explosive for the State of Connecticut, which was so threatened by Lamb’s project that it filed a six-figure lawsuit against the book’s contributors for the cost of their incarceration. Contributor Barbara Parsons Lane received the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award in 2004 for fighting for inmates’ freedom of speech. Lane was released in 2004 and continues her advocacy for women behind bars.

The media loves to focus on abuses of the system when criminals get an absurd windfall, but ignores the much greater number of cases — not newsworthy because too routine? — where women already beaten down from childhood by poverty, domestic abuse, and neighborhood violence are punished as if no decent person would have broken under the strain. Reading this book will challenge your ideas of “us” and “them”. How much are our free, law-abiding lives creditable to our own self-control, and how much to the fact that when trauma struck our own lives, we had the cushion of a safe home, a good education, or financial security, to keep us from a desperate act?

“The Approach” and Other New Poems by “Conway”


My correspondent “Conway” has been very prolific this summer, writing poetry inspired by the books and printouts I’ve sent him: T.S. Eliot, Alexandre Dumas, Stephen Dobyns, and even yours truly. Conway is the pen name of a resident in a maximum-security prison in California, where he’s serving 25-to-life for receiving stolen goods under the state’s draconian three-strikes law. Here’s a selection from his recent work:

The Approach

The Sky offers empty promises
smiling with toothy clouds
blades hiding in the invisible wind
pushing forward an orgasmic rain
wide open mouth, stuttering-n-drooling
over the gloriously ravaged land
polished and preened for the dance
electric frustration crackling
instinctive thunder cackling
destructively loud vibrations cuss
at all of mother nature’s fuss
primping for her approaching sun
another beautiful day begun…

****

Pretender

Smell the dust circulating
rumble of gears, chattering wind
pushing past shadows of patience again
pressed faces on clear glass, melted sand
trapped & strapped as time flails
crouching in concrete jails
tumbling hearts in a coin-op dryer
hoping tears will gratify
those moments that pass them by

seasons march with unseen smoke
dawn breaks down upon the broke
strung up tight in spider spun cords
sung all night by distraught mothers
and those muddy misplaced others
pretending to be alive…

One of their pastimes in prison is the “poetry war”, challenging one another to come up with poems or raps on specific topics, often in response to a previous poem by the challenger. I had sent him this ballade I wrote in college, which was inspired by Richard Wilbur’s Ballade for the Duke of Orleans:

Ballade of the Fogg Art Museum
by Jendi Reiter (1990)

The squat museum’s walls decline in plaster;
black iron gates like screens before it rise,
given by graduates now turned to dust or
some more profitable enterprise.
Inside the vaulted halls, the street noise dies
the way the light too fades, as filtered through
too many windows, till the sight of skies
uncovered seems forever out of view.

Upon the wall the carving of some master
hangs as it did over centuries of cries
seeking the aid of this tired saint whose lost or
disputed name was once a healing prize;
saint of the mute, saint of the paralyzed,
of cures some true and some believed as true,
all that their less than truth and more than lies
uncovered seems forever out of view.

Lone stained-glass windows stand, as if the vaster
church fell away and in the rubble lies,
disordered jewels, displayed as if they last were
no necklace, broken when the wearer dies.
Behind them a lit wall the hue of ice,
unchanging light that cannot prove them true,
the sun’s capricious grace that stupefies
now covered and forever out of view.

These corridors wish also to sequester
the wanderer in halls as dim and dry as
the echoes of dead theologians’ bluster
of strict dichotomies that like a vise
close round the listener, until he tries
to follow their imagined bird’s-eye view
of black lines, like this map, where all that eyes
uncover is forever out of view.

Like some grim doctor of the church, the plaster
bust of the founder means to supervise,
mute guardian of a world he tries to master
by over-studying what he is not wise
enough to love; a searching hand that pries
out each thread separately to find the true,
happiest when the tapestry they comprise
is covered and forever out of view.

Above this roof, a bird descends no faster
than snow through shining air, like some demise
so graceful that it isn’t a disaster;
to be a fallen angel would be prize
enough if one could but fall through such skies,
past autumn bursts of leaves’ bright mortal hue
which no recording hand can seize, which lies
uncovered now, then ever out of view.

A wasted hand preserves and petrifies
the gilded tree, flat heaven’s lapis blue.
The leaf must fall, the leaf must improvise,
uncovered now, then ever out of view.

****
In response, Conway wrote the poem below. It plays more loosely with the form but has an immediacy and passion that my old poem lacks. Round #1 to him!

Ballade of Arms Justice

by Conway

 

This prison squall defines disaster

how many doors of life must waste

Through corridors paint, white alabaster

statues risen — fall wine they taste;

dear ground bones have, fed budgets bill.

Minds’-eye blue sky, though still it lingers

upon thy heart and always will

it pays long arms, not sticky fingers…

 

Now here in thought, recoiled much faster

and left our freedom more in haste

These green suit goons design my master
keys that unlock, chains round my waist
and slop I cannot stomach still
we must digest this smell that lingers
until we’re sure we’ve had our fill
for long arms pay, not sticky fingers…

Those white house pillars, fake alabaster
have kept injustice-jackboots laced
we fear the blue steel beanbag blaster
upon the skin burned sentence placed;
It was against forefathers will
to plant, the prosecutions ringers
on the side that fights to steal
laws long arm pays, not sticky fingers…

Law keep your lies, you’re not my master
I cannot be easily replaced
My family reels from this disaster
your long arms pay not, our sticky fingers…


“Pocket Full of Violet” and Other New Poems by “Conway”

 

My prison pen pal “Conway” continues to make great strides in his poetry and artwork. As I mentioned in last month’s post, conditions have improved at his new location, where he has a job in the library and access to colored pencils and a typewriter. I hope to reproduce some of his drawings here soon. He often picks up themes from the classics he has been reading and reworks them in a voice that’s all his own. He sent me these poems after reading T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. I heard some echoes of Eliot’s closing section (“What the thunder said”) in the first poem below.

In his July 17 letter, Conway writes,

“…The other day while going through work change (strip search) the lady (if you wanna call her that!) searched my lunch (state issue baloney, apple, bread & mustard) well I had put a scooter pie inside the bag, I had purchased from canteen — she said I was not allowed to have it, who knows what (security risk) this would present, ‘the great marshmallow pie war’ so I ate it, you know, destroyed the evidence, literally….

“OK now on to bad news, they shot me down Calif Supreme Court on my writ of Habeas Corpus. So now I must file in Federal court. The basis for the appeal is #1 violation of contract (plea agreement) being as there was no mention of 3 strikes law in original plea bargain in 1987 that if I was arrested for non serious crime I would receive life in prison. I have good federal case law that confirms my argument plus the due process doctrines. It’s hard to get anyone’s ear on this stuff, though. Everyone is so caught up in their own drama they could care less about all the people stuck in here on an illegal law, as long as they have their big screen TV and what-nots….”

From July 26:

“I’ve been going to work almost every day since I got assigned to Vocational Education Clerk. So not much to blabber about, except last Saturday we had a yard down incident (upper yard) I’m lower yard, but they make us all prone out on our belly when they answer an alarm. Any rage, it was 109 degrees and I had my shirt off yard shorts on and was walking the concrete track with a buddy, so we belly crawl off the blazin hot concrete (stayin low) over to the grass field in the center of yard and, were obviously lookin to see who got got, so to speak, and I noticed that the grass was itching real bad, and thinkin it had just been a long time since I laid in the grass, I commented to my buddy “man this grass itches” about that time he looks over at me and says “Dude you got Ants all over you” Sure as heck I’d laid myself smack dab on an ant hole, so we slow crawled sideways and I brushed the critters off me, feelin like the interloper. Crazy huh? I know an Ant can’t move a rubber tree plant, but they sure moved me 🙂  “


Pocket Full of Violet

What love can clutch me
will remain forever, sheltered inside
the refuge of this stone heart
among a lazy river of stars
rising to meet my eyes awake
searching this endless silence
waiting for a break, carefully.

Chances & chains connect our soul
with so many sighs undone, reflecting
glittering like glass marbles
framed in stone and drowned by tears
shuffled savagely by foul years.
Broken fingers of the wind
departed softly unheard, and wept
swept through a lost window
behind another dull evening moon
bringing the bright kite
with a pocket full of violet
waiting beyon this wall
heavy on my heart
promising a new start
in an empty chapel
built by the lean,
mean and broken, spider’ web.

I sat alone in the pew
behind myself, daring my heart
to turn the key and cope
pierce this fierce dark with hope…

********

Spider

A spider hurls his rope up high
into an invisible windless sky.
His silk flag floats down
spinning a sticky town.

He laced up a Butterfly begging to be free
he swallowed her, but won’t feast on me
I wave my middle finger, curse & mock
he smiles and points at his key to my lock.

Someday, he motions, but not just yet
I wonder, do spiders ever regret
forget the paralyzed pleas of their prey
cursing the web, his bite, this Day…

********

Little Brick 

This little brick went to prison
that little brick went home
that little brick went missin’
this little brick’s on his own
that little brick the cops hassle
put the little brick back in jail
built a little brick road & a castle
brick by brick straight to hell…

********

The Gavel

When the Gavel came down it glistened
   should’ve splintered from the sound
echoing in my mind, still shaking the ground
   no one else heard but I listened…

When the gavel came down I bled
   while my family mourns, I’m alive still cold
buried in concrete on steel shelf
   filed away, story untold

When the gavel came down
   we all shut the book on life, in this scene
a library of lost souls
   somewhere-n-nowhere
and everywhere in-between

Then the gavel spoke, deafened
   I started to choke, lost my mind
for all life to spend
   in this library of prison, when
the gavel gave its final decision…

 

Inmates’ Access to Religious Books Threatened


From the government that brought you Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo…Not content with violating the Eighth Amendment, our prison system is taking aim at freedom of religion, too. Chabad.org reports on new federal regulations that would remove thousands of religious books from prison libraries:


From behind bars, many prisoners turn to religion to fill the void in their lives. Frequently, prisoners’ pursuits dovetail with the prison system’s goal of rehabilitating the convicts in its care; at the end of their incarcerations, if prisoners leave with a better understanding of right and wrong, so the thinking goes, they’ll be less likely to return in the future.

But that logic has come under fire recently by a federal rule change implemented in May limiting prison libraries under the domain of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons from carrying no more than 150 titles dealing with any single religion.

The new policy, while rooted in a desire to prevent religiously-motivated militancy from taking hold in federal penitentiaries, has struck some – particularly Jewish prisoners and officials with the Chabad-Lubavitch Aleph Institute – as odd, considering that many traditional Jewish texts like Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah legal code are now off limits. The rule is being challenged by Jewish, Christian and Muslim prisoners in a class-action law suit.

“Inmates in prison are searching for a sense of spirituality; they are looking to adjust their lives,” said Ron, who spent the past two years and seven months as an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Yazoo, Miss. As with all of the other prisoners and former prisoners interviewed for this story, Ron requested that his last name not be used.

“Inmates are looking to help themselves and search for ways to rehabilitate,” he added. “Most people on the outside do not hear the cries for help from inmates. Many have very little family contact, [and] there is an atmosphere of hopelessness.”

Surprisingly, according to Ron, who was the leader of his prison’s makeshift Jewish community, most prisons are not built with rehabilitation in mind. With the exception of the odd meager job, inmates could, if they so desired, sit around and do nothing all day. Some take the time to plot future crimes or harbor resentment at a system they blame for keeping them incarcerated, he asserted.

Prisoners’ constitutional rights are more limited than those of ordinary citizens, for security reasons, but even so, the regulation should not withstand a constitutional challenge, assuming that the judges obey precedent rather than politics. I would actually argue this as an Establishment Clause issue, not only a Free Exercise issue.

A good case can be made that the regulation fails the second and third prongs of the Supreme Court’s test for Establishment Clause violations in Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971): it is not neutral between religious and secular content (treating religious literature differently from other books that potentially contain extremist political ideas), and it creates excessive governmental entanglement with religion (determining what sect a book is assigned to — e.g. are you going to have 150 Protestant and 150 Catholic books, or just 150 Christian books? if the latter, how do you allocate that quota among 1,000+ denominations?).

I don’t discount the danger of radical Islam spreading in a disaffected prison population, but an overbroad crackdown on all forms of “religion” sacrifices one of the very freedoms that we are fighting for.

Meanwhile, readers, clean out your basements and donate your old books and literary journals to your local prison library. And I mean good books, not just drugstore paperbacks. Prisoners are looking for something of substance to fill their days. I might pick jihadism over Jackie Collins if those were the only two options on the shelf.

“This New Armada” by Conway


My correspondent “Conway,” a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods, reports in his July 13 letter that conditions have improved since his transfer to a new facility. He now has a job as education clerk, grading GED’s, and access to a typewriter and a library of donated books. (Unfortunately, I have no way for readers of this site to send him books without revealing his name and location, which he’s asked me not to do; instead, if you are so moved by this post, donate some quality reading materials to a prison in your area.) Here’s one of his latest poems, written on the back of a news story from several years ago about brutality at Corcoran prison:

This New Armada

I never understood this loss
   till cuffs were locked behind my hands;
I should’ve seen it comin along
   slidin past my hourglass’ sands.
Inside heaped stones, heavy of time
   forever life’s boulders climb
out of reach my memories leach
   reminisce the cloudless sky
clinging to my heart, like a lover apart
   caught in a hurricane’s eye…

Treading the sweating dust, with lust
   after a desert storm,
bringing the singing lightning along
   in its jagged twisted form.
On this unwholesome Armada —
   of prisons, marching across the land
waiting to crush the abandoned souls
   into miniscule grains of sand
These inescapable islands adrift
   dark sentinels of injustices thirst
a land of chain webs-n-mazes
   cunning nets, sworn to catch you first…

High walls with strung wires
   broken strings on an old guitar
reminding the unforgiven alone
   left serenading “The Morning Star”
it is bad when you run away
   “They say” that Razor wire hurts
Those ominous ropes reveal —
   past attempts, you can see
their decomposing crucified shirts…

“Lonely Tier” and “Flash” by Conway


Here are some new poems by “Conway,” a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods. In his May 2 letter, he writes that he was recently relocated to a new cell block whose yard has a much-appreciated view of the outside world:

“I have moved to another place and the cages we get to go to for yard for four hours two or sometimes three times a week, are in perfect view of the entrance road to this facility, so we get to see cars trucks and motorcycles drive in and out and there are these trees along the outside perimeter that are shedding these seeds when the wind blows, thousands of little paper flowers searching for a home to grow roots, a very nice change of scenery from being behind the wall for so long. I saw a woman ride by the other day on a bicycle and wrote a poem about her, not sure if you would approve though, kind of racy :)”

Lonely Tier

Each night I sleep on this stony bed
passing me by, is a world in my stead
with the sounds of defiance corrupting our day
encroaching that compliance along the way
this cave made daily being dug so deep
hungry and craving we wander and weep
a concrete tomb constructed by tears
secreted from waves of trembling fears
it flows through those gates of wrath
on the golden coast it reaps this path
for a tear is an indestructible thing
the brilliance in there can make angels sing
But, when it’s reaped with bad intent
that lonely tier breeds wicked sentiment
a tear falls in the wind    blows back to me again
as forgiveness for my sin
returns to me as a priceless gem…

********

Flash

She was bent in half as she rode
peddling fast our sublime sweet dream
time flew past under white garments seen
flashing the hint of something in-between
at the speed unattainable you’d need
to ever accomplish that deed.
   But, we all watched her blast
furtive glances traded as she passed
Those in the know, enjoyed the show
igniting our memory of those
fires down below, shaped right
on desire’s one handlebar.
   Who is that lucky star
who opens that locket
shared in the pocket compared
behind curious door, while garments mingle
tumbled wreckless on carpeted floor.
   Always seeking release
or a little more pleased
as those others teased, so much
wished for just a little touch
offered in a flash…

Prison Poetry by Shrong Clemons


The PBS documentary series NOW ran an episode this week about an innovative program in the Sheridan Correctional Center of Illinois that aims to reduce recidivism by combining therapy, education and follow-up counseling for released convicts. In this video clip, former drug dealer and gang member Shrong Clemons, who became a model prisoner during his 20-month stay at Sheridan, performs three of his poems. Watch the whole episode here.

“Stream of Thought” and Other Poems by “Conway”


“Conway”, a prisoner at a supermax facility in central California who’s serving 25-to-life under the state’s three-strikes law for receiving stolen goods, has sent me some new poems that I share below. Writing materials are often scarce for him, so he composed these on the back of an official memo listing the rules for the Administrative Segregation unit (as I understand it, a variety of solitary confinement). Excerpts from that document are in italics below.

Stream of Thought

Take a step back, through the open door
Slide a pace forward on this polished floor
analyze the truth, judgments always do
ineffectually, mendaciously for me and you.

Which shadow that falls, which court has set aside
Censured from my youth, where folly used to ride
springing out of the deepest roots revealed
brought forth by the lies that truth concealed.

Is it candles on an altar, or sacrificial bread
or some speculated monologue of what was said
would thee that I banished a tenacious thought
stagnating in the streams of screams they wrought…

   ****

1. Anytime you exit the cell you will be handcuffed and will exit backwards.
2. There are no warning shots.
3. You will assume the prone position when ordered by staff.
4. Showers are conducted on 3/w and are 5 minutes. You are allowed 1 pair boxer shorts, 1-towel, shower shoes and soap/shampoo. No shirt or socks.
5. Supplies are issued on 3/w every Friday.
6. Visiting is on Saturday and Sunday 1 hour behind glass. 1300-1400 hours. You must be in compliance with departmental grooming standards or the visit may be cancelled.

****

The Same Thing 

These cracked stacked cages of ruin
   marching along in line, locked up keeping time
this heart of stone I found was drowned
   begrudging every last sound…
Still we fight this rock all night
   tossin-n-turnin like pages black & white
I spied outside my window to be
   that window looked in on me;
I asked the reflection “what do you see?”
   it did not answer me (how could it?)
   Those sands of time withstood it
but an echo said the same thing, took away the sting…

****


12. No magazine, newspaper clipping are to be placed on any cell wall. You are allowed to place 2 pictures on the wall above the head area of your bunk.
13. No covering of the cell lights or door window.
14. Mail issue and pickup will be conducted on 3/w.
15. No cadence will be allowed when on the exercise yard.

****
Fly

Flies buzz around this room forever out of luck
bouncing off the pane of glass not knowing they’re stuck
burn themselves out and expire on this windowsill
I’d like to think I’ll get out, but I know I never will

I’m lower than an insect, bouncing off the melted sand
can see what I want but can’t hold it in my hand
I swear I almost see, the transparent wind blowing
as time slides by, these midnight candles glowing

Check on my reflection something wise to recognize
all I seem to realize I’m like those buzzing flies
wings humming prolonging an avoidable fate
I’d love to let-em out, but, I sweep-em up on a later date…