As 2011 comes to a close, I want to offer a few words of gratitude to the regular readers of this blog. When I began writing here in July 2010, I had no idea what I would be getting myself into. I had no expectations that anyone beyond my immediate family (perhaps) would care to read my random musings about the prison industrial complex. In the last year and a half, I have made new friends through this endeavor and I have learned so much from total strangers. It is astonishing, really.

I always appreciate your e-mails (of support and also those that take issue with me). I have also had the rare privilege of starting new pen pal relationships with current and formerly incarcerated people because of this blog. I so appreciate your ideas and most importantly your desire to use your stories to teach and to transform.

It has been an extremely busy and sometimes trying year for me. I have a more than full-time job running a grassroots organization, I have been teaching some college-level courses, and I am involved in countless other activities. In between, I have been trying to remain a good friend, sister, auntie, daughter, godmother, and partner. We all need time to refuel and recharge so I am going to take a few days off during the holiday season. I will be back here regularly blogging in the New Year and I hope to continue our conversations (even when they are one-sided).

Before I sign off for the next few days though, I wanted to relay a story about a young man who I have been working with for the past few months. He has been struggling greatly since his release from prison in March of this year. He is ill-equipped for “life on the outside” as he likes to say. He is easily angered and raises his voice to make mundane points. Any suggestion is perceived as a criticism and a slight. His favorite word to use is “respect” and yet he has a difficult time showing any for others. I am not telling tales out of school since everything that I am writing about him, I have also expressed directly to him (more than once).

Just last month, he told me that he has been reading my blog regularly for the past three months. I never tell the young people who I work with that I blog unless there is a story involving them that I want permission to share. Frankly, I was surprised when he told me this because one of the issues that we are tackling is his unwillingness to follow-through. So the fact that he makes time to regularly read anything is a victory to me.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been pressing him to write something that I can post on the blog. I think that it would be a good way for him to express himself and perhaps even get some feedback/encouragement. He has resisted my entreaties so far but I am persistent. I believe that he has it within him to be a powerful storyteller. He is brilliant and verbally gifted. So in lieu of writing something, I asked him what he might want to share with readers of this blog. What he shared was simple and yet so profound: “Tell them that I am a human being,” he said. I won’t analyze what he meant by this. I will leave it up to you to imagine. However, I hope that he will take me up on my offer to give him space to write on this blog in the new year. I hope that he will choose to expound on the words that he wanted to share with you as readers.

One of the ways that this young man and I connect is by exchanging some of our favorite poems. The selections that he has encouraged me to read have had a real impact on my thinking and on my life. When I saw him yesterday, he gave me a new poem. He told me that it does the best job of expressing his own feelings about prison. “If I were a poet, this is a poem I would write,” he told me. Then he asked that I share the poem with you. Happy Holidays and may 2012 bring you peace, health, and inspiration!

Prison Letter
by M.A. Jones
1982, Arizona State Prison – Perryville

You ask what it’s like here
but there are no words for it.
I answer difficult, painful, that men
die hearing their own voices. That answer
isn’t right though and I tell you now
that prison is a room
where a man waits with his nerves
drawn tight as barbed wire, an afternoon
that continues for months, that rises
around his legs like water
until the man is insane
and thinks the afternoon is a lake:
blue water, whitecaps, an island
where he lies under pale sunlight, one
red gardenia growing from his hand —

But that’s not right either. There are no
flowers in these cells, no water
and I hold nothing in my hands
but fear, what lives
in the absence of light, emptying
from my body to fill the large darkness
rising like water up my legs:

It rises and there are no words for it
though I look for them, and turn
on light and watch it
fall like an open yellow shirt
over black water, the light holding
against the dark for just
an instant: against what trembles
in my throat, a particular fear
a word I have no words for.