its the birthday of john lennon who said,

 

"If everyone demanded peace instead of another

television set, then there'd be peace."

have a nice friday, y'all.

"Prison is a young man’s world, a world of physical violence and posturing, a world of brute strength and primal, unfocused rage. It is not a place to grow old, although more and more of us are doing just that: growing old in prison. 

When I entered the system, I was a young man. I spent my days lifting weights and worrying about my status among peers. I rarely considered the significance or the magnitude of my predicament. In fact, the only lesson prison imparted to me, at least to that younger me, was how to be a prisoner. 

I found out how to exist with another angry young man packed into a concrete box too small to be a bathroom anywhere else. I learned to become an accomplished thief, an exceptional liar, and a proficient hand-to-hand combatant. The state wouldn’t provide for my desires so I stole to satisfy them. Truth is often viewed inside, by prisoners and guards alike, as a form of weakness; I figured out early that the big, well-told lie was superior to the mundane and pedestrian nature of mere facts. 

And in the joint—in a world where violence is king, perpetuated by us against us, by us against them, and by them against us in a dizzying choreography of preemptive attacks and retaliatory strikes do-si-do-ing around sneaky backstabbers and goonish thugs with battery-filled socks still dripping blood and lead-gray brains in their baggy pants—I came to the no-shit-Sherlock conclusion that I had best become as dangerous as possible. So I did.

All of this living at a high-revved pitch, expending all my strength to meet the challenges in this branch of Hades, wore me down to a cinder mote. This is the common experience of those who spend their youth in such concretized suffering. The accumulated weight of years lived pushing against the immovable yields a premature decrepitude. Long-term prisoners, particularly those of us who threw ourselves into the scrum as young men and never managed to slip back past the buzzing electric fences, age at a rate out of sync with the chronograph of time. 

As I struggled to maintain the battlements I constructed in the frenzy of youth, the hinges and choke points began to fail—gradually but inexorably. My wrists can never forgive the thousands of tons of rusty pig iron I balanced, or the poorly executed angles I threw as I smashed fists into leather heavy bags. My knees were clicking and popping while I still struggled to hoist weight bars into narrow slots, well before I began the 10,000-mile trek on tight oval tracks as a prisoner of the state. Hair and teeth vacated follicles and sockets, blond locks disappeared, and vigor succumbed to weariness in the infernal contest to keep upright in this maelstrom. 

Before long, an old man stands before all of us, his once bulging muscles and steady hands drooping and shaky. Around this old man the frantic and pointless swirl still heaves its poison in blackened chunks of dissipation and frustrated longing. The rough currents gouge fissures from our weathered hides, all battered into smaller visions of our means-to-an-end existence untethered by wrongs or rights: Before you screw me I will screw you. While almost inevitably we will end up screwing ourselves . . . or at least watching impassively as we are banged into tightly compacted knots of self-immolating futility.

Prisons are madly violent places. Even in the absence of manifest violence, even without the constant stream of broken bodies exiting horizontally, or the rifle fire and clanging, shrieking alarms hounding our beings like dangerous pitchmen hawking insanity, in even the less glaringly violent prisons, violence is always a part of the experience. Every encounter is tinged with the musk of incipient, barely restrained outbreaks of violence. 

Prison is that part of the developed world least altered by civilization, by modernity, by the growth of any consciousness of peaceful interaction. In here, the old scourges hold sway in epidemic proportions. Racism, tribalism, all the old “isms” are still vital and dominant, still driving behavior and ruining lives. In a sense, prisons are society’s dustbins, the dumps into which are swept not only the various miscreants but also the various felonious ideas no longer acceptable in polite company. 

Perhaps at this more basic level, the prison is a literal repository of society’s most feared ideas and people. The trouble for those of us growing old in prison, we of the broken body and wounded, drained spirit, is that free society’s fears far outlive our fearsomeness. To that society I will forever be judged by the wail of a police siren long silenced by time and the ghoulish 8-by-10 photos of the man I killed in another lifetime. In the collective mind on the other side of the chasm between here and there, between some kind of death and some kind of life, I am still a merciless marauder with bloodied hands.

The type of man who endured when life was still “nasty, brutish, and short,” who survived the primitive war of all against all, passed down to me his foul temperament and inclinations. But he is as dead in me now as the endless steppe. In his place stands this me of today. Immeasurably wiser, and indeed better, the me of today recalls the wild man of his youth as a sort of fictional character, a mythic being who did not know fear or infirmity, who had no concept remotely connected to mortality. Neither did this barely recalled me grasp the more fundamental concepts of right and wrong, of what it is a young man ought to do in the course of a day’s turning. I now know all of these necessary truths—the truths of wisdom earned by the accumulation of scars. 

For many of my age group who remain buried in these places, particularly those serving uniquely American sentences that stretch beyond the horizon of life expectancy, there is a willful juvenilization. It is a function of remorse’s soul-etching acid bath. We desire to regress back to the time before our fall, before we tattooed the black letter of shame onto our foreheads, back to when possibility resided in our lives as a presence and not a barely recalled ideal. 

Our resistance to maturity is also closely tied to the milieu of prison itself. The life we live is that of a child. Devoid of responsibility and cursed by the smallest of expectations, it is not the life of an adult. The program is geared to the lowest common denominator, to the erratic twists and emotional dysfunction of an out-of-control teenager. It is designed for who I was, not who I am. And this acts as a potent retardant. 

Days for a prisoner grown old devolve to a fruitless struggle to be an adult in a world of juvenile delinquents while navigating the painful straits of physical and emotional decline. In this army of outcasts, one can never exceed the rank of buck private. It is a life of forever proving your Stygian bona fides to the human conveyor belt of newer but always the same damaged souls sleeping in the bunk above or below yours. It is convincing the next doctor, the new young guard, the latest whoever that you are not the irredeemable thug your tattoos claim you to be or that their dehumanizing training has preconditioned them to expect. 

It is a series of maddening struggles that leave you drained and embittered— angry at the new prisoners around you who won’t see the wisdom of your experience and demand to spend themselves on the same unwinnable battles; angry at the new guards who refuse to see you as a reformed human being and daily treat you with brutal disdain; angry at the world, at the nature of unreasonable fate, at God himself. 

At the root of it all, down in the darkest recesses of your mind, your greatest anger is at the rotten mother------ who put you in this place in the first place. Your most pointed anger is directed at that younger you, that unthinking, unrepentant, and irrational you. 

The problem is, no matter what the rest of the world believes, that younger me, the me who crashed into and out of my life and left such a chaotic path of destruction, he no longer exists. He is a ghost unaffected by punishment and pain, but his presence continues to define my life. When I look in the mirror at the old man looking back at me, I cannot see even a trace of the brute who stole lives, my own included. It would probably be easier if I too could still see the younger me, but I cannot.

Growing old in prison is a horrific existence of dashed hopes and sclerotic veins, of unrealized longings and arth­ritic knees. It is a withering away from life into the out-of-focus backdrop of a bad movie. It is a fate worse than death’s frozen silence because it is all too cacophonous and all too desperate. I cannot imagine departed prisoners clamoring to rejoin this tormented existence. No one would wish to resume a life of seeing respite just out beyond the fence line, beckoning, shimmering right there in full view but always out of reach."

Kenneth E. Hartman has served more than 30 continuous years in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation on a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. A writer and prison reform activist, he is the author of Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars (Atlas & Co., 2009), a memoir of life in prison.  For more information, visit www.kennethehartman.com or www.facebook.com/kennethehartman. E-mail Ken at kennethehartman@hotmail.com.  

two turntables and a microphone

where its at.

Letters from the Outside, #22

Emergency room. This no fun all business wavelength disturbance in my belly for two moons now, the days drag with bent and rusted cutlery weighing down my duodenum. Thats my hypothesis. But the crystal lite lethal injection external gel probes reveal nothing. Im sent home with a best of luck and try the pink stuff. Not however before I hallucinate Love My Way wafting in the mobius command central and when rose from gurney to vision chamber conveyor left a defiant scattering of dog hair, called out to the impassive god of radiology I Feel Like Im Going To Wet Myself after the droid hierophant administered hot contrast and the hands of my mind swelled to archetypal queens cabbie proportions and returned to myself I apologized to the air and the disembodied voice of his priestess came from everywhere We Have Heard It All, the cultural significance of my jewelry questioned, and my quantity of arm hair commented upon.

For weeks now the word duodenum has soft-shoed its way across my stage several times a day, a silent vaudville act, a hot dog in top hat and cane. I offered an abridged version of this to the triage nurse taking my vitals and she snorted, and I think perhaps she experienced me as confessing some delusion, you tell people, even low level health aid bureaucrats, that youve been thinking a lot about the word duodenum, and theyll look at your brown converse low tops and your keffiyeh and apply to whatever emits from your organism a neutralizing mist of suspicious disregard. The little german attending physician would have heard me but the presence of authority regressed me to a precocious acolyte supporting role. So ill call my pointy booted country doctor whose my doctor precisely because I can say to him I Keep Hearing the Word Duodenum and hell attend to it. Sitting through years of fifth grade bioscience as a one-on-one left the word firmly imprinted since the teachers never pronounced it right and that kind of thing eats at a person like me unless we can learn to let it go but I rationalize my fervor in defense of education. Do Wah' Dih Numb.

Hey, more rain today. The anti-emetics keep me out of the fetal position but Im really aware most of the time that my natural pain impulses are being interrupted. I usually try and keep my sad stories out of these letters, but this sickness has been like living with a third arm protruding from my back, and it helps a little to process it by telling it to you. So thank you. And now that weve been told I wont be playing the part of Eva Peron anytime soon, it seems manageable, and safe for chat. 

I braid my hair, make chocolate chip cookies, bring a little saturated firewood onto the back porch to dry, or maybe just not get any more wet. Which reminds me of a note I wrote once to myself that said “Dont try to make it less cold. Try to make it more warm.” The Piggy Hat travels to its head. Enclosed please find the note sent along with. I try candied ginger, and entertain a persistent craving for dried fruit. In a moment of blinding weakness I fix myself a turkey sandwich, premium comfort food of my childhood, to even briefly mollify the dragon pinned under the cage of my ribs, wing talons scraping my stomach out, the refracted heat of fire from down below, inside somewhere, feed that demon and get the dishes done. But theres an appointment on monday.

 

Spring and Fall are mud seasons. The persistent rain gives me a greater opportunity to see where I can redirect some of that gravel tumulus, between the north beds and the drive, a growing rut of mud ive been feeding stone to, insatiable. Taco night! An effortless supper the boys love, that lets us closely examine the gardens tomatoes in their suchness for the last time that year. And involves sour cream, which is a luxury I seldom afford myself, in favor of plain yogurt which is cheaper and goes farther and evolves into buttermilk when the recipe calls. The sour cream I bought for a stroganoff and have been doling it out to myself in dibs and dabs like methuselahs spun honey. Ive been all romantic about food lately because its been so far away. The sacrament of it, the beauty of the Earth, and our direct relationship to Her. For one long moment in the parlor im okay, hips swaying softly, chewing an awesome handcrafted cookie, considering the books on the shelf. snake bird messenger plays.  Everybody in, I start dinner. T. and I discuss the riffy, prominent bassline in My Cup and the telepathic technology possible to send most computer hardware into obsolesence. The smell of cumin. R.L. Burnside. Rain. 

Open Letter to First Limb on Second Branch:

I recognize this is not how Gap does it. Its how the hat evolved with the skills I had and my own personal aesthetic which is unfortunately for other folks difficult for me to back burner on a project. I also apologize for the protracted amount of time youve been made to wait. As your father can tell you ive been feeling like shit on a shingle for about two months now and even though the hat proper has been done for yonks, the bitty stitching ive been avoiding because I suck at bitty stitching and those Gap people have blind Laotian orphans to run their embroidery machines. The nose is totally different, and somewhere im disinterring the bones of a nineteen-eighties floppy cotton hat with phony sunflower centerpiece that my sister dressed her daughters in. Trying to redeem the travesty. Honestly, I just knit longer than I intended to on the nose part and instead of starting over I stayed the course and danced with it. In my dotage I believe I may becoming acquainted with this spacious patience, this dancing, and practiced it on this hat. If you want a circle nose higher up on the crown, or little mitties or anything else I can apply the Shirley Feeney Improvisational Scarf Dance to, let me know. Knitting rocks.

And the cookies are pretty good, too.

I hear the crying of the hungry in the deserts where they're wandering
Hear them crying out for Heaven's own benevolence upon them
Hear destructive power prevailing I hear fools falsely hailing
To the crooked wits of tyrants when they call

I hear them all

I hear the sounds of tearing pages and the roar of burning paper
All the crimes in acquisition turn to air and ash and vapor
And the rattle of the shackle far beyond emancipators
And the loneliest who gather in their stalls

I hear them all 

So, while you sit and whistle Dixie with your money and your power
I can hear the flowers a-growing in the rubble of the towers
I hear leaders quit their lyin' I hear babies quit their cryin'
I hear soldiers quit their dyin', one and all

I hear them all 

I hear the tender words from Zion I hear Noah's waterfall
Hear the gentle lamb of Judah sleeping at the feet of Buddha
And the prophets from Elijah to the old Paiute Wovoka
Take their places at the table when they're called

I hear them all.

its the birthday of Monty Pythons Flying Circus.

"And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu... And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it."

 
Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me.
And if I tried
to give you something else,
something outside of myself,
you would not know
that the worst of anyone
can be, finally,
an accident of hope.
I tapped my own head;
it was a glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house
or your kitchen.
And if you turn away
because there is no lesson here
I will hold my awkward bowl,
with all its cracked stars shining
like a complicated lie,
and fasten a new skin around it
as if I were dressing an orange
or a strange sun.
Not that it was beautiful,
but that I found some order there.
There ought to be something special
for someone
in this kind of hope.
This is something I would never find
in a lovelier place, my dear,
although your fear is anyone’s fear,
like an invisible veil between us all…
and sometimes in private,
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.

For John, Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further, Anne Sexton

Letters from the Outside, #21

Rain. A hard rain, all day, and the creek rises. So I make a french press of coffee and play Yann Tiersen (think gypsy circus), feeling very bohemian and oddly content. I must reiterate the recent changes in my mindframe. Some beautiful shift in my perception of self, an enlightenment, a liberation. And I think this is the first relationship Ive ever had that has provided help and healing, not hinderance. I smudge, and pray, and sweep the back porch. I was driving in the pickup to get the Golden Boy and I suddenly felt myself an eighty year old woman, stooped back and small dry claws gripping the wheel, listening to james mcmurtry sing choctaw bingo on the satellite radio. It was a happy moment, really, to think id live that long, and feel at ease, and be tooling around the back roads toward the petrol station now run by the middle aged children of the folks who started the place when I moved here. Giving away my place at the school was a far greater sacrifice than I thought it would be, and returning to its fold is one of two boons I ask of the world.

Last night a very fall sunset, electric apricot against magenta, last lit flicker of lilac before some other dreamer rose with the sun. the lawns are full of leaves. Rain washes mud from the pumpkins. Rain rivers between the gravel and grass toward the road that goes anywhere. Rain that runs in the chimney. Rain that rolls down the dogs back. Rain that carries with it the breath of a billion brothers and sisters on this little mossy rock traveling round one enormous burning star. Rain that washed my converse sneakers thundering now in the dryer. Rain I long to dance in. I play music, that potion, that healer. 

Again to town today for sugar and tobacco, rain in the culverts spilling onto the road, everyone wet and giving off humidity again the basement full of water but the creatures fed and the sheets clean and Yonder Mountain String Band doing Girlfriend is Better and a walk later to see what time accomplishes. Diamonds, stars of the dark earth, burning to bright.  Last night walk under an ultramarine sky with thich swaths of stars some already cinders falling away toward other suns. 

Thursdays rain still running in the culverts, capless acorns in a rustling curbside of leaves and the asters are everywhere. The old womans mirrored sphere has been replaced by a plastic urn in the shape of a large paschal lamb. It is filled with mushrooms and plastic purple berries. Rolled bales like insulation for the windbreaks for an instant the sharp smell of ramps a winged messenger sent on the long journey to beckon spring. Tomato soup in mugs and toasted cheese. A letter from my Most Excellent Friend. The third sump pump vibrating the floor boards every minute and a half. In a pasture of morning blue sky grey flannel clouds huddle like sheep before cold weather. The smoke from chimneys moves flat along the air. The dogs and I climb down onto a wash of shale from the climbing trickle of falls and pools and the roots of trees exposed by water, the thin moss and leafmould smell and the good human feeling of knowing youre headed home. Climbing out onto the road I get the last mud between my toes for the season.

I am still knitting socks, may start to take it more seriously, use sock specific yarn, take the time to make them fit heel to toe. A great constant project to keep the monkey mind figgering and travels exceptionally well. Late start, dark early. Folding laundry, sorting drawers. A roast squash. How ceaselessly poor we are for the not having you. You and your dog out in the leaves attending to, the peaceful happy resonance of humanity, a comrade in the wilderness. 

Supper of slowly roasted sweet potato with butter and sour cream and salt scooped up over Rolling Stone. A little dish of ice cream for dessert. Cowboy and I will watch something weve already seen with George Clooney in it and then retire into a long night under the duvet with books and dogs and sleeping. The poodle rallies from her gastrointestinal distress. We sit and rock with dogs in our lap. Its a Quaker silence, punctuated by whatnot and laughter. More quiet concertina, and the warmth and glow of the room in the night outside and the sound of water, the smell of cold. Dreams of fish shacks and fine yellow houses. Grey morning gives way to bright afternoon with leaves falling like snow on the tall grass and I am grateful for the way things are, and the way they could be. We miss you.

 its the birthday of Wallace Stevens.

"Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms
Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began."

its also the birthday of Graham Greene who said his bipolar disorder gave him,

"a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life" and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material," 

and

  "Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, 

when the sense of curiosity has withered."

have yerselves a fine weekend.