Disrobing

You say you want to know the beloved but you don't lift the filters that keep you from seeing. How can you know what another sees, feels, thinks, desires without dropping, for a moment, the screens and lenses through which you define the world? You see what your pain has made to be real and true, not what is actually there. You must learn to listen to the story the other tells, to crawl into it, embrace it as dearly as you embrace your own, sleep with it, touch its cheek in the deepest night. You must stand naked in her gaze. You must imagine to the point that you feel what the beloved feels, taste the sweet or bitter truth that she carries. Then you might begin to know, to take to heart an alien land you have never before visited. If you can do this, your boundaries may begin to crack open, like an egg, and you will flow into a yet larger horizon, having lost what you thought was the end, entering the pain of beginning again.

Night Bloom -- Despair and Possibility in a Prison Writing Workshop

Turnout was even slower than usual, so I, a visitor to the workshops, and one inmate had the Programs Room to ourselves. The visitor was a young woman, a poet, and UA student who wanted to help with the workshops. The inmate was Champ, a thoughtful but hardened guy with the tattoos that go with gang affiliation. Likely because no other inmates had yet arrived, along with the novelty of a female visitor, he spoke openly about his offense, his time spent incarcerated, and his view of the future.

"One of the rules is that you don't rat. I'm in here because I didn't rat, but you know what? Nobody has stuck with me. I don't get letters from the woman who said she'd love me forever or the homies that said they'd stick, but still you can't cut from them."

He pauses to think, to consider whether or not he should say what he is about to say.

"Once you go down that road, the gang thing, it's hard to get out," he said. "So even after my sixteen years served for murder in here, I'll probably be back."

He said it with a flat, matter-of-fact certainty.

I asked him what he wanted to do if he weren't caught in the cycle of gang violence and politics.

"Something to keep kids from doing what I did. You know, someone who has been there can say it right, in a way that they'll understand."

"Nobody knows what the future brings," I said. "We could be hit by a meteor in the next second. You just don't know. That's all."

He thought about that. I had a book by Shaka Senghor, Writing my Wrongs, and asked him to read some of the forward. It spoke to the possibility of shaping a future that worked for more people, had more opportunity, more justice. He read the passage aloud.

"That's tight," he said.

Now I don't know the shackles that come with gang membership. And the talk about a future that might break from a past that seems all but certain to repeat itself must seem quaint to someone with a history like Champ's.

Other men arrive, and we get to work; our visitor reads a poem. In it she has a line about a gun being held to her head. It's a good poem about the perils of love. Her work is sharp, fearless. The men listen and then respond.

"Did you really have a gun held to your head? Do you know what that's like?" one of them asks.

It's a credibility thing.

"Yes," she says.

The man gives her a hard look that lingers, but then softens.

"That makes a difference," he said.

I try to divert the discussion to the features of the poem, lines that stand out, but the group lingers on the subject of coercion, threat, and the leg-trap hold of prison politics.

"You know a guy was murdered on the rec yard this week," one of them says. "He wanted out of a gang. He was stabbed over thirty times. That's why we were late. The cops were doing a drill to speed up response time."

That hangs in the air.

"How long have you been writing?" Champ asks the visitor.

"Since I was twelve. I wrote to figure out my place in the family. Writing was the only place I could see some way through an impossible situation."

Champ says "Yeah, I started writing in prison, about thirteen years ago. I was eighteen."

Then, he looks at me. "But I still haven't been published in that magazine."

He says it as a challenge, like it's my fault. I get that. I am a stand-in for all the obstacles that he and others face in moving forward into a life coming hard and fast and fearful down the pipe. The past is roaring toward them like a freight train. They want to tell it, and have someone hear it, before the train wreck.

The room feels charged, nervous, uncomfortable.

"I like the honesty, the self-awareness, and images of the poem," I say, just to say something.

You have to start where you are I think.

Champ doesn't waver, and asks to read a piece he has written about betrayal. It's succinct and dark and literal. I ask him where he wants to take it.

"To the magazine," he says. "I want this in the magazine."

I ask for responses, suggestions from the group. I ask how to take it from a list of events, a history, to something else, something artful. I talk about what others have done: Othello, for one.

One of the guys knows the work. We talk about betrayal and ways to live through it, to write about it, to give it fresh life and venom on the page.

Champ passes the baton of reading off to Handpoet who has written a piece about the power of music to trigger memories. When he hears songs on the radio, he hears, not the singer, but his father's voice. He means this literally. He hears the voice of his father.

The poem is good. It disrupts time. It renders memory as free from time, free from space; it makes a case that prison walls are no match for the power of the mind to remember, to imagine.

He says he keeps his music alive by singing on the yard sometimes, away from the clusters on men scattered around the field.

Champ asks him to sing, right there, in the Programs Room. Handpoet declines and shakes his head, but others join in. He agrees.

I don't know how this happened exactly, but Handpoet stands and begins to snap his fingers to some beat he hears. The room otherwise is silent.

He begins to sing, softly at first, then stronger. It's doo-wop song I don't recognize, but his voice is clear, on key, resonant.

When he is done, the men applaud.

Some of the tension in the room eases. Time is up. I have to pack up the tubs and get over to the next workshop. It's in a different unit and we have to catch a bus. My arms are heavy, clumsy, don't feel like my own.

The moment has cut me to the bone. I ask myself what one does when a gun is held to the head. The answer, impossible as it is, comes. You sing. You sing.

Settling

You know you are not supposed to do it -- according to all the motivational speakers, the career counselors, your job description -- but you have to settle sometimes for what you get. You can't afford that fancy Subaru Cross Trek, so you buy a little Versa. No power or sporty cachet, and the women are not impressed. In fact the guy next to you buys the Suby and gets the woman, the job, the promotion, the publication; he passes you on every bike ride, eats more green, leafy vegetables, and is a high-flying success story because he is more daring. He rides a rigid single speed instead of a cushy, old-man bike full-suspension. He cuts in line in front of you because you are so spacey, so incoherent. Yours is a life of scattered, half-finished projects and mediocre achievements. You have failed to focus, to sustain, follow through, go deep, produce noticeable results. You are a vague facsimile of what you might have been had you lived up to your potential. And it's about over. Your body and brain are breaking down. Time's up. Game's toast. You are going to finish at the end of the pack. You need to cut your losses. Bid adieu. Time to end wanting what you can't have, throwing pearls into a bottomless pit. You got what you got. It wasn't so bad; and it's time to do something else, re-invent what's possible, given your brain, body, and empty cup of offering.  

Fishing

You never know what you will catch when you get up in the dark and go out into the surprise waiting for you outside the safety of your front door. There might be a lunker hunkered down in an eddy of your sleepy psyche. You have to toss out an invitation, a tasty possibility, a pending opportunity, and then settle in for a wait. Soon enough you may see a swirl on the surface as the critter rises for the bait. It's a thing you know but may not be aware of as it takes shape in cluster of sound and idea. It is your destiny calling, waiting for you jump in, take a step into the fearful unknown. You see the line go taught, see the bobber submerge. It has taken the question you chant as an incantation. Feel the tug as you sink the hook into a passing messenger. The other side of the veil has awakened. It's up to you reel it in. 

Dragon in the Chicken Wire

My five-year-old neighbor, Geo, was staring intently at something in the front yard. Now that's not so unusual. A Cooper's hawk likes to bathe in the fountain, and javelina or bobcats come by for a drink or to snag a trader rat. It's a lively place. Blocked from my view was the subject of Geo's fascination. It was a writhing diamondback rattlesnake caught up in the chicken wire around the xeriscape island. It was braided but good with one pass through a chicken wire hole followed by a second. Now what did he/she have to do that for I thought. A small group of bystanders had gathered by now as the white belly of the snake twisted in the early morning light. To cut him loose, the head would have to be restrained. I'd cut, but someone had to hold that business end in check. A bite might mean months or years of recovery. Been there. Stuff that. Those present retreated when asked. A guest with no previous rattlesnake experience volunteered. He held the head and neck of the snake while I did the surgery on the wire. Now, having my hand six inches from the fangs of an angry diamondback had my little heart fluttering, no... hammering. In my mind, bat wings opened and closed while streams of fire shot from the hissing mouth. Eyes were red with rage and vitriol. The tail was going hot and fast. No matter. Ignore it. Cut him loose. Snip. Snip. Reach around to the back. Hope the tongs hold. One more. Done. Once free, I caught him with the tongs, told him to never come back and carried his puffed up, fire-breathing, rattling, sinuous body to the wash. He retreated with a hiss, a quick look back to make sure I wasn't following. That way he could travel quicker into the misty world of my dreams. 

Maybe the Fool

They are gathered there, as volatile a mix as any in the years of the workshops: Sonny, the self-described rage-a-holic, Handpoet, the on-fire Aztec teacher, Cercedes, the braided tough guy who likes to get in my face, Ortega, who wants the first draft to be the one that gets published, and Bell, the quiet giant to name a few. The only inmate race missing here is white. We are reading an inmate poem about poverty. One of the COs is sitting in, but that doesn't keep them from saying what they want to say about the poem. "I love it," Ortega jumps in. "I wouldn't change a thing." He is sitting next to me, and his gaze is both a challenge and an opening. I have to be diplomatic. There is some face to be lost here if I go too hard. "Let's look at the lines that work best," I offer up as an entry into the discussion. I ask the men to identify and read the line that stands out. We go around. "So, what do you think?" Cercedes interjects, looking right at me. "You got some answer there and you're holding back." I wish I had the magic comment, question, or incantation that would prompt the writer to send his poem from where it is into the realms of the sublime but I don't. I can only point in the direction of where others have gone. I read a published poem, similar in form and subject, but that has more sensuality, more metaphor, has greater complexity of ideas, intensifies feeling as it progresses, and ends with a zapper of a turn. "Sensory detail, images, examples, structure, and sharpening ideas" I say. "That's the work we as writers all have to contend with when revising." A mutiny of sorts erupts, but the writer of the poem in question, nods, and says "I think I get what you're saying," and that settles the rebellion just a bit. Sonny backs off, but Ortega and Cercedes are not done. They demand more explanation, and make it clear that they, as inmates, have just as much to say as I do. What am I doing here? That "I" is more of a "he," some alter ego that has fallen into a slot on a roulette wheel and is going along for the ride. Is that he the fool in the cross-hairs on a Saturday in a dark room with men hungry for expression, for insight, for direction, for something to hang on to? Maybe. Whoever this is is not the hero of the show. Rather, he is the one who meets the gaze of his own shadow. 

It Steepens

They came from very off, through a fog of distance. I closed my eyes to better focus. My mind kept wandering, did not want to listen for the beeps coming through the ear phones of a hearing test. I caught only the dimmest of tones and voices. The sounds that did come were garbled. I couldn't sort them out. Was the prompt "peat bog" or "beef dog?" I couldn't tell. But I kept honing my attention. It just wouldn't settle on the listening. I wanted out, felt like I was going to panic. The rest of the world just kept on doing its business, calm and cool as the plastic wrapped cukes they carried in the Costco shopping carts. The shoppers outside the window looked so at home in the world, so comfortable in the knowledge that they had time, luxurious stretches of love and life and time. I, by contrast, feel an urgency, see each moment in this abundance as a diamond, am watching it all slip away. I no longer care if the book gets published, if I get in shape for El Tour, and am aware that I may never again have someone unbutton my shirt, playfully push me onto a bed. I am a dying man walking, but nobody knows. The audiologist looked surprised. "I didn't think you had it, but you do. You seem so... functional. It's not profound, but is getting there.... " She held back a bit and re-calibrated her delivery of the results. "Let's just look at this as a baseline. If you feel that you're missing too much in your teaching or other areas, you really should come back." She meant get a hearing aid. "Check with your primary doc first to rule out anything else that might be contributing to this." And that was that. I took the print-out of my results, another datum in the long line of evidence that things are progressing a bit quicker than I would like. The delights of this world are receding; the pitch steepens even as it fades.