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"

Sleep-Talk of the Modern Writer: A Joycean Saga, Part II

James Joyce, textorized with an excerpt from Ulysses by Maxf 

“Oliver St. John Gogarty noted that the typical modern writer was doomed to go on talking to himself but that it was left for James Joyce to go one step further and to talk to himself in his sleep in Finnegans Wake.”

From Charles Reznikoff Bio on Poetry Foundation 

Internet, technology, modernity, and history, the Joycean nightmare, the daily dream of the silenced voice, speaking in thought, imagining a placeless space of mind, the code of subjective emergency. I lay half-awake, surfing the viral webs of unreason in my sunless haunt, of trivial whereabouts and soundless frequency. An internal vibration wakes me into another dream of subconscious sleep, the inactive pause of breath. In the information age, for the modern writer, free speech is a painless bubble of thirst. My words are a mere spidery sleep-talk, spinning the collective web on and on, to perchance catch the insect eyes of innumerable minds, insights unseen, and only felt, as the nerve of a quiver.

See related post: A Joycean Saga of Psyche, Muse of Endless Night

_________

Before I went to prison I sat around a family circle. My grandfather was in his prime and all of his siblings were alive. That was the last time he put on his sailor cap. 

Portrait of a Sailor by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

A new fish stinks straight out of water. These metal bars are hot with memory. I clean past my fresh environment. There is a consensus of suicide and the death of life. I steal a look through my most haunted imagination, and it’s real. A shark-toothed man with pomade-drip hair and an orange shirt draws his own jaw. A thin, black-haired youth pierces his erect member into a cellmate. Even if I were passing straight through this corridor, it would be hell, and this is my new home. 

Prisoners Exercising by Vincent Van Gogh

I’ve returned to my grandparent’s abode. He’s dead. I wake in the middle of the night. The house is empty. I have never seen it empty in my whole life, ever. What am I doing here? The only presence is the lightless noise of my empty past.  

__________

"A secret curing,

Brewing twilight

In the motionless loss of our human presence

From the awaited future, yet eternal sound

In patient happiness breeds the contented need to produce

Chirps

To entice the sickness of pride to leave with day and unite mind

With a grateful stare into the mind’s ending"

excerpt from "City Birds"

To All The Freedom Poets Shouting In The Dark

“HAMAD DREAM OF 2030 IS NOT APPEARED YET IN BAHRAIN!...HAMAD YOU ARE A DICTATOR”  - from a protest sign at beginning of film

“I feel really alone. Whether it was a democratic country or an authoritarian country. All of them acted the same when it came to us. I discovered that my humanity is a subject of discussion. Should I be killed in the street or not be killed? Based on the interests of the United States or Saudi Arabia or other countries. It’s the killing of a dream.”

“When I’m sleeping, a lot of times I dream we are returning to the roundabout. To this day I dream it is there. I don’t feel it is broken.”

"This [facebook] page was a virtual lynch mob, focused on a 20 year old girl, named Ayat al Qurmezi. She had read a poem criticizing Khalifa and the King at Pearl Roundabout. The page asked thousands to participate in defaming her honor, and demanded her arrest and torture in prison. It wasn't long before they got their wish. Masked commandos broke down the door of her family home and took her to prison...After three months in prison, Ayat surfaced for this apology on state TV, which the family says was obtained by electric shock torture and forcing her to open her mouth while army and police officers spat in it." 

- from "Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark" by May Ying Welsh of Al-Jazeera, the only journalists who stayed

Ayat al Qurmezi (read her BLOG)

"I have not yet finished forcing every candle of dreams (youth) on this motherland..." 

- line from the poem by Ayat al Qurmezi which led to her imprisonment, translated by Mohamed Al-mahroos

_________

I had come out of a bedroom, pajamas and all, to greet a few friends. Sitting patiently and in reserved calm is my wife and a local actor in town, sitting outside in the main room of my abode. I begin talking about recent books I’ve read. I start talking about a book on the subject of black history in the American South pointed at the presence of the actor, who I only recently became acquainted with. I continue to divulge in The Inconvenient History of Brazil, which I learned received the greatest influx of African slaves than anywhere else. She is sweet and doesn’t mind me carrying on. In another room, my brother and a friend are worriedly arguing about how to get to Los Angeles, specifically to have more drinks. Ignoring them, I saunter out of the house and find my way to a nearby bus stop. 

Small trickles of rain bear down on the fogged windows of the bus as we cross through a muddy swamp area. The bus driver is exceptionally personable and a great comfort, in total control. In mid-conversation, I ask to be dropped off at a local convenience store. The cold, wet ground feels like a vent of sticky moisture from the saturated soil. Immediately outside the door, three homeless Aboriginal people kneel prostrating outside the store entrance, while one of them, a middle aged lady takes to a free gift of exceedingly processed fast food. I enter, greeting the store owners. As I look out the window, I see a group of girls in beachwear catapulting themselves off a nearby roof for the humorous purposes of landing on a trampoline. I walk out to get a closer look. The first lands extremely short, the second a bit further and right on her spine. She gets up aching, only to watch a third catapult far beyond the trampoline’s distance. Her impact is felt with crushing intensity as she writhes in a split-second. Witnessing, one can immediately tell her thigh must be broken. I then enter the store again, and with uncontrollable laughter, we are outraged by the stark contrast between the different kinds of help needed around the store. 

_________

History

"To dream that you are reading history, indicates a long and pleasant recreation."  

Rain

"A powerful symbol of renewal and spiritual cleansing...Interpretation is contingent on your current circumstances as well as the kind of rain that is falling...Depending on the dreamer it could suggest a period of renewal and fertility (reproduction or creativity)." 

Help

"If you dream that you help someone, or someone asked you for help, it means that you will succeed without needing help from anyone."

(iDream)

_________

can you tell me why you want to lose your minds?

“is the mind not a functional device?

a stronghold of impurity, though weak as a right?

a vile desire entrenched in the quickening of race and drabness? 

or old as a tire-stretched din?"

shrieking at dawn with favored kids,

roped to the sound in time 

only for a moment

“to flesh out the wicked rot 

a spawn of loss and un-coped wires

fuming ghastly as the corpse 

that smoked wild smoke

and leapt to a magic unseen and disbelieved

except by the weeded out freak-smiling lawmakers at dawn”

the hopeless mold sweetens through an unearthly jail

round toxic commotion encircles in ash and loneliness

wakefulness opens to the sole breath of god

and waiting awhile for the noose tightened,

alas around the saviors brightened tooth shown under a restful laugh...

- excerpt from "Why you want to lose your minds."

The Dream Gamble of Hannah Szenes

She was a heroine of WWII, fought to save her people of her fatherland, the Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz.

Before her death by firing squad at the Hungarian border, 1944, she wrote her final lines of verse (found in her cell after execution)

One - two - three...eight feet long
Two strides across, the rest is dark...
Life is a fleeting question mark
One - two - three...maybe another week
Or the next month may still find me here,
But death, I feel is very near.
I could have been 23 next July
I gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost.

- Hannah Szenes


To all those who give their lives to Dream and falter, ask: does the Dream yet live? I have Dreamed it so.