Fear: Spoken Word of a Female Prisoner

"...the fear of prisons

The fear of strip searches leads to 

The fear of being naked in front of other women 

The fear of keys leads to

The fear of chains

The fear of small spaces it leads to

The fear of tears, the fear of dreams, the fear of loneliness

The fear of being forgotten, it leads to 

The fear of time, the fear of lies

The fear of metal doors leads to

The fear of dark empty corridors 

The fear of insanity leads to

The fear of separation, the fear of isolation, the fear of segregation, the fear of being a statistic." 

Spoken by a female prisoner at the final minute of short film, "Beautiful Sentence" 

Not until I wrote this did I understand the double meaning in the title...sentence. What phenomenal beauty there is in the regeneration of oral storytelling through writing. That is my key literary focus this past year, as I reflect on my greater literary ambitions. As I re-watch this humble documentary on an oft-recurring subject, the impact of poetry on prisoners, I think about the unique predicament I'm in this year, in relation to the subject of the above-quoted poem. I won't be departing or arriving in airports this holiday season. I'm staying far away. Although I am not incarcerated, I can feel the fear that this prisoner speaks of in her poem on the blatantly unjust quality of airports, and remain ever thankful that I have the option, and freedom, to not pass through, at least for now. 

_________

In light of not remembering the narrative arc of any dreams as of late, I am posting original photography from my waking life in relation to the initial topic instead of spontaneous prose and historical art

Crashland America by Rusty Kjarvik

Skeletal Cockpit by Rusty Kjarvik

No School by Rusty Kjarvik

Crash from the High Plains by Rusty Kjarvik

God-Awful Rhinoplasty by Rusty Kjarvik

__________

"An epic
of intention,
a bruised nation
and the stir-crazy polity,
struggling
with the sad gift
of only one humanity

a shipwreck beauty,
gleaming with the light of the ancients
over star-crossed paths
circulating through the veins
of an unbroken galaxial unity

evolving beyond one heartbeat to the infinite
blending of colorful awe
in the transitional being’s destiny
as wormhole wanderer
...

neck-tipped wheels edging naively on the backs of extinction,
Buffalo Confederacy of the western mage
playing tricks on white society beneath a rainbow cloak,
bundling rain and the boom of truth in our drum’s not-forgotten flower mask, straying now from pleasure and hate
in the unborn seat of quiet yearning

with English tongues of grotesque neighborly wick,
suffocated and pouring
over the tea-stained talk of elder medicine
healing beyond death
...

'knowledge in space,
as verbal structure,
passes beyond inert caution
to a stimulated dream-law,
intelligent yet nude'"

excerpts from "Epic of Intention"

At the Romantic Edge, Before the First Impression

The Golden Bough by J.M.W. Turner

"WHO does not know Turner’s picture of the Golden Bough? The scene, suffused with the golden glow of imagination in which the divine mind of Turner steeped and transfigured even the fairest natural landscape, is a dream-like vision of the little woodland lake of Nemi— “Diana’s Mirror,” as it was called by the ancients." Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 1

Lake Nemi by J.M.W. Turner

__________

Reclined on plush couches in a generic condo lobby, my friend and I watch a political debate. Angered by a statement by the Prime Minister, he becomes extremely deviant in his manner. “No one should be living in Canada.” The argument goes on to delineate the environmental truths of socio-historical degradation in the wake of our 21^st century fate. Mindless, he unzips the entire leather covering and filches it for a sell. I follow in cheeky amazement.

Blasted knocks deliver crushing blows to the weak door, the hinges creak and splinter. A mass of Jewish men greedily express their intense fury. I unlock the door ever so slightly, leaving the chain lock in place. “Your friend’s killed our boy. A little man is dead.” Their mouths sputter with chainsaw smoke as they charge ultimatums and death threats in the name of my absent friend. “He’s skipped town,” I excuse. Unwilling to confront their standing guard, whose immovable post at the front of my residence is an unwelcoming barrier to my normal life, I flee with no plan to return.

Petworth House, Interior by J.M.W. Turner

After a filthy cheap bus ride, I clamber out upon the beach sand, and peering into the bright daze of lake horizon, I see my friend in a drunken rage at the water’s edge, swinging a heavy sack. As I approach, I see madness in his eyes. He is another person altogether, I sense a body in the leather couch covering. “Why didn’t you sell it?” I yell over crashing waves and turbulent wind. He simply eyes me with confounding disinterest and without a moment’s passing, he flings me headlong into the water, where we are all to drown with the corpse-filled leather covering. I swim, and as he plummets to the lake floor, suicidal and lost to the world, I grab through the heavy seaweed and rocky outcroppings with salt and stone eviscerating my every bit of skin of its human moisture. A whale’s fume stings my side and I feel I am being helped along, a fellow mammal and helper in my midst. And the undertow sucks me ever deeper beyond the shore’s shallow depths out to the plain sea.

Fishermen at Sea by J.M.W. Turner

Marooned on an island, miraculously alive, I am cast over a rocky shoal, where the sea moss hangs in a color scheme of subdued purples and deep greens. A man, of unknown origin, aids me in crossing a hillock, emptied of its cavernous rock, a mere sparsely covered hollow of mossy, volcanic emergence. As we reach out over the pockmarked swill, the entire island’s mass becomes visible, a wonderwork of natural phenomena, indescribable in its wonder: a truly new land.     

_________

in the shamanic din of civilized inclinations
to become the oldest persona of grace, emergent
of land intoxicated by the avian lords
who roam tearfully in landless bush
above the streaming Pacific's current
fanning to seed
atop island exotics
and breach the blind exploration
from nothing

to an essence of discovery
in the learned,
seated life

- excerpt from "Drugged Love, Seated Life"

Delia Derbyshire, Electronic Music Pioneer

More of her Dreamwork

Frisian Monuments

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

During a daytime nap or after-morning drifting, bird's eye view over an island that resembles England, only without buildings, completely bare with short grass, lines appear where grass doesn't grow, thin trails of dirt from above connect stone monuments, I peer closer to look at the stone monuments, they look like Stonehenge, though the entire setting and atmosphere is pre-historic and not Polynesian because of the low grassland environment

Thurs, May 5, 2011