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POEM: At the Rest on the Shoal

10/24/2014

There, on extended granite fingers
Lie the remains.
A shell amongst shells,
Lines rotten, the jib a jagged spike.
Sharp, lacerating eyes cling to every rock,
They witness the eternal passage of time.

It rests there, agape
Bleached white.
Static.
Who were you before?
Why do you lie, detached from the center?

A distant V wheels and dives.
Dark green swells of a mysterious world
Rise and sink,
The broken hull cares not at all.

Sands shift up and down,
Waves erode the shore.
Who were you before?
When time held meaning and urgency.
Who were you before the brine ate your thoughts
And life flowed in and out with the tide?

I've Never

10/23/2014

I’ve never been married or had kids, but my understanding of a normal, stable life derives from this very thing. As a growing boy – delinquent I told myself settling down would not be in my future because it seemed too placid and limiting. Besides, who wants to raise kids like a litter of contrary house cats when there’s a very large world to explore?

I’ve never voted for a politician, though the year I turned 18 Ross Perot bragged about being able to pay off the national debt with his oil money. This made him seem cool, even if I knew absolutely nothing else about the candidates or politics. In the years since, my life has been immersed in capital punishment politics and, were it possible, I might have voted Gore, Kerry, Obama, and maybe Hilary. Maybe . . .

I’ve never possessed more than four-hundred twenty-five dollars, paid bills, or had a job longer than three months that paid more than minimum wage. I’ve never owned a car or license to drive, though if I had, my insurance would’ve been pretty expensive because there is only one way to drive a car: faster. Drugs and alcohol and irresponsibility prevented any sort of financial responsibility and I couldn’t be bothered to slow down for stability.

I’ve never met my brothers’ wives, my niece’s husband and sons, or my nephew. My imprisonment has removed me from the family picture, erasing my name and image to leave only a faint shadow where someone used to be.

Since my incarceration at the age of 19 there has been plenty of time to think of all the things I never had the chance to do. Everyday I’m reminded of how the free world was at my feet – I could have been anything. Yet, it was the simple goals I took for granted and regret missing out on the most. Having a son or daughter to carry on my name and knowledge, teaching him or her the ways of a world I struggled to understand, and being an equally loving partner to my wife were fearsome prospects I saw ending my wanderlust. Voting was a frivolous concept irrelevant to my young life. Getting high or drunk dominated everything. My thoughts were for eradicating the need to think or feel beyond instant gratification, and long-term decisions or repercussions didn’t fit in that equation.

Seventeen years later these choices haunt me no matter how much I try to move on. It’s apparent I was sick with addiction and had other serious mental health issues, but I don’t use this to justify any poor decision. Also apparent is how these choices cannot be unmade. I can imagine flirting with a P.O. Box wife, but it will never be like the real thing. I can hope my nephew contacts me when he is older or that one day I am released from prison and able to do all of the things I should have done the first time around, but until that day comes I will have to be content with what I can do.

Guest Post: Two Poems by Timothy White

10/12/2014

One Quiet Breath

One quiet breath amidst chaos of mental constructions

Rambling thought-chatter and random memories’ seductive sway;

Detailed visions of places seldom recalled, dreamlike yet vivid –

How attachment screams, “Let me go back and live it all again!”

But I must let go

One quiet breath when I hate this world, wanna beat

These prison walls into submission but sit instead; sit

With anger and fear, hopelessness and despair, a lifetime

Of dark energy – it’s all in my mind after all

One quiet breath because there’s nothing else to do

But breathe, no other higher calling than to embrace

This moment of consciousness somewhere in the space

Between past and future

One quiet breath in the dark of night when loneliness

Casts its cold shadows over my heart and all seems lost;

Here beneath it all there is only truth found in the vast

Labyrinth of mind, the yawning void of darkest echoes

One quiet breath and I’ll stop this ongoing struggle

Against the universe and just sit

Observing the madness within

Outside My Window

Full moon shines over Central Prison

Even brighter than background of city lights

Beyond chain-link fence, outshining

A thousand lonely porch lights from a thousand

Lonely houses, even the high-rise bank building

With its gaudy manmade glow

Silver moon cuts through haze of

Clouds, reflections of fear and death,

Ugly face of human bondage where luminous

Beams catch the bloodthirsty points

Of jagged concertina wire and hypnotize

Me with steady light

Human Rights? Not in Solitary Confinement

10/11/2014

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It's happened again. Another mentally ill inmate has died as a result of the mistreatment of prison guards at Alexander Correctional in Taylorsville, North Carolina. Anthony Michael Kerr was in solitary confinement and denied water for an unknown period of time until he died of dehydration. This is a horrendous way to die, especially considering it occurred at the hands of staff charged with caring for prisoners who need more attention -- not less.

In 2008 another mentally ill prisoner at Alexander Correctional, Timothy E. Helms, was severely beaten with his hands cuffed behind his back. His skull fractured, a large boot-shaped bruise in the center of his chest, Timothy later died of his brutal injuries and all the while staff maintain he fell on the way to the showers.

Like Kerr, Helms was in solitary confinement and mentally deficient, but rather than receive much needed treatment from staff psychiatrists he was murdered. It seems the treatment at Alexander Correctional leaves patients dead.

In both cases a handful of low-level staff were fired or asked to resign, but no criminal charges for either death are forthcoming. The change being called for is a request for emergency prison staff to fill the many vacancies in the state’s prisons. As if that’s going to help. As if more of the same treatment will cure how the mentally ill are dumped into the prison system. If ever there was a need for mental hospitals such as Dorothea Dix it is now.

In the Kerr case the medical examiner claims to be unable to determine if the man’s death was an accident, natural, or a result of homicide because she hadn’t seen any official record. It’s almost as if she needs to be told what conclusion to reach.

Here’s a theory: if you isolate and restrain a man in a cell, then deny him water, he will die of dehydration. Since this takes some time and it was the intent of prison staff to deprive Kerr of water, this deliberate indifference to the man’s suffering resulted in his death. There is nothing natural or accidental about Anthony Kerr’s lack of basic human rights – he was killed by abusive prison staff.

That another mentally ill inmate died as a result of mistreatment in solitary confinement is no surprise to those of us who have served time in an isolated cell. Many of my experiences on Unit One at Central Prison, ICU at the Maine Youth Center, Safe Keeping at Blanch Prison in Greensboro, the Morganton High Rise, and the Buncombe County Jail have shown me jail and prison is where authorities don’t have to justify the abuse of power – it’s all they comprehend.

Any attempt by prisoners to decry isolation by yelling or banging on the door is met with excessive force. Chains or straps for four-point restraints, food rationing, canisters of mace emptied through the food slot, the water and toilet shut off, tasers and shock shields on naked flesh, and assault from thugs in uniforms while the prisoners is handcuffed behind the back and shackled – this is how prisoners in solitary confinement are treated in North Carolina and across the country. For those unfortunate who are resilient to such abuse and remain uncowed or incapable of understanding some prison staff don’t care – there is death.

When the horrors of Abu Ghraib were broadcast around the world many prisoners laughed at the indignant headlines. Where do you think such tactics were learned? Several of the military guards at the prison in Iraq previously worked in the American penal system. It doesn’t matter whether you are a suspected terrorist, mentally ill, young, old, male, or female, the hole in America is a reflection of its ugliest aspect. It demonstrates how vicious and pervasive our need to control and punish people has become. It is also suggestive of the primitive urges typically found in the undeveloped countries to which we pass the torch of democracy and civilization.

Where are our human rights, America?

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All That Matters

10/6/2014

In 2006, a friend of mine on death row was given an execution date. His appeals exhausted, the remaining arguments made by his attorneys were falling on deaf ears. My friend was okay with this. After living on death row for over two decades he learned to reconcile his past with his future and was at peace.

Four weeks before his scheduled execution my friend was allowed visits from friends and family members up to three times a week. Pen pals, siblings, children, grandchildren, his mother and other relatives all made or tried to make an appearance. For many of them it was the first time during my friend's incarceration they came to visit. It was bittersweet.

He said to me, "It was really frustrating and sad to see some of them." All he wanted the entire time he had been locked up was to stay in touch and communicate with his family. He knew prison is hard on family connections, but he consistently wrote to his brothers and sisters and tried to be involved in their lives. Only rarely did my friend get a response and then it was a simple card, maybe a little money. What he wanted from his family more than anything they refused to give him.

Until the final weeks of his execution date my friend never met his grandchildren, and his son was only a sporadic writer at best, but now he wanted to visit and write everyday. Death has a way of reminding people of the things and relationships we take for granted. In the final weeks before his execution date my friend saw more of his lawyers in two days than he had in the decade since being appointed his case by the Indigent Defense Services.

All of the attention was overwhelming and emotionally enervating. To make matters even more complicated he received a last minute stay of execution, which was soon followed by an indefinite hold on all executions due to some legal challenges to the execution protocol. In many ways this was a torturous experience, being ready to die then getting told, "Oh. Sorry, not today".

Shortly after his friends and family discovered the stay of execution and this evolved into a de facto moratorium, my friend's loved ones disappeared. It seemed once they knew their brother-uncle-father-grandfather-friend wouldn't immediately die, there was no need to stick around. No more visits. No more letters.

It was hard to feel grateful his life had been spared when my friend was forced to experience being abandoned by his family all over again. Coming back from death watch and the acceptance preceding one's execution is trying enough, but to return to the desolation of an absent family is soul crushing.

I am intimate with the pain of being ignored and rejected by family members. Everyone on death row and in prison knows of this anguish. It's why so many of us can't help hardening our hearts just a bit, so when contact from the outside does come it doesn't hurt quite so much. In feeling the sense of loss I can't help wondering how many of my brothers, sisters, and cousins would visit if I were given an execution date in the coming weeks. I think about how bewildered, joyful, anxious, saddened and angry the experience would make me to see these virtual strangers after so many years of silence. Then I realize more than anything I would be overjoyed to see any of them because my love for my family has not diminished over the years and distance.

Maybe that is all that matters. Even if it is only at the end my brothers and sisters and extended family decide to say goodbye and tell me they love me their reasons for staying away are irrelevant. It does me no good to dwell on the pain, but serves as a reminder of the love I have for all of my family.

POEM: At the Rest on the Shoal

I've Never

Guest Post: Two Poems by Timothy White

Human Rights? Not in Solitary Confinement

All That Matters

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