ESCAPE FROM THE PANHANDLE PART ONE

 

DAY ONE

Tuesday morning, early, August 12, twelve of us leaving Okaloosa C.I. were herded on the Bluebird, the prison bus. In a cloud of diesel exhaust, I turned my head away for the last time from the Panhandle hellhole where I’d spent the past twenty-eight months. My main thought was, “Thank God!”

At my last 5:30 AM breakfast at Okaloosa, the sergeant in charge of the re-entry dorm and program was upset that I was leaving. In one fell swoop seven classes that I’d been teaching became leaderless. I felt regret for the almost one hundred students I left behind, who looked to me for guidance, but one of the oldest adages of prison life came to mind: you come to prison alone and you leave alone. (Not counting your family and loved ones, who serve your sentence with you. Inside these prison fences, you are on your own. No promises, no guarantees.)

More needy prisoners, more classes, more service awaits me. Once the officer told me to pack my property, I looked ahead, not behind. That didn’t make things any easier for the re-entry sergeant, who has to scramble to salvage much-needed programs. She tried to help.

After a couple hours rumbling east on I-10, we got dumped out at the Northwest Florida Reception Center, at Chipley, which continued the strip searches, ransacking of personal belongings, profanity-laced verbal abuses and humiliation by guards specially selected for their sadism. Although they took two personal towels I’d had since the 1990’s, some pens, and broke my radio headphones, I felt I got off lightly, considering the abuses heaped upon some of my fellow travelers. Sometimes, having served thirty-six years in prison for murder bestows a small advantage. “Leave him alone. He might snap and kill you.” that is an advantage the run-of-the-mill drug offender, burglar and sex offender can’t claim, as undeserved as it is in my case.

DAY TWO

We spent the night at that hellhole, were awakened at 2:30 AM Wednesday morning, endured several hours of boredom, abuses, and ransacking before forty-plus prisoners were packed into another prison bus for the next leg of the journey, a four-hour trip that became a six-hour survival test in a metal oven on wheels. Temperatures in the nineties, heat index (outside) over one hundred degrees. I have no idea how hot it was in that overheated tin can, but it was insufferable.

Tiny window grills barely admitted even a hot breeze. When a semi-truck would fly past us, it would push fresh air through the window slits, but otherwise we sweated and suffered. Holocaust cattle cars came to  mind.

A prison bus is a locked cage on wheels, and inside that big cage was a smaller cage holding three prisoners from disciplinary confinement. Whether from the unbearable heat, a lack of water, or epilepsy, about an hour east of Tallahassee, a prisoner in the smaller cage began having a grand mal seizure. The two prisoners in the cage with him didn’t know what to do, except try to prevent him from hurting himself worse, and yell to the guards to stop the bus.

They are not stopping the bus. Forget it. Forty-plus prisoners in leg irons versus two guards with pistols. Anyone could fake a heart attack or a seizure. This one was for real. Didn’t matter.

There is a procedure for everything in prison. We were crossing Madison County, so the bus driver diverted to Madison C. I., drove inside the fences, and called for a nurse. The noon-day sun beat down on the thin metal covering of the Bluebird. I know how the turkey must have felt in the oven, except he was cleaned and plucked, but I was just roasted.

We sat there in the broiling sun. I felt light-headed, soaked in sweat. Several prisoners implored the guard outside for water. He relented and sent in a jug of tepid water, scarcely enough for a cup apiece.

One of the main complaints of modern prisoners is the lack of unity and purpose among the prison population. Gone are the days of protests, sitdown strikes and petitions. Economy-size pepper spray canisters are liberally applied to brook any dissent. In a dog-eat-dog prison world, it is every man for himself. But yesterday, packed together and suffering in a sweltering prison bus, for a short time every man rose above his circumstances and shared in a rare commodity, water.

I was seated in the back of the bus, near the exit door, where the water jug was placed. No way would those few gallons stretch to the parched men at the front of the bus, but in a spontaneous example of altruism, the men in possession of the water jug signaled for the men at the front to pass their cups back. The cips were half-filled and passed to the front, hand-to-hand, until everyone had drunk some, then the water was parceled out until it was gone a few minutes later.

The man who had suffered the seizure remained unresponsive. They maneuvered him out of the cage, to medical, and eventually we continued on our way to the North Florida Reception and Medical Center at Lake Butler, Florida. More institutionalized, profanity-laced abuse was endured. Do they train their people in inhumanity and humiliation tactics, or does it come naturally?

We finally wound up inside the building, seated in folding chairs, for medical screening. Take your weight and vital signs, blood pressure, pulse, etc. The scale must have been off. I know every one of us lost a lot of weight to dehydration in the six-plus hour trip in the sweatbox, but I weighed 224 pounds Tuesday, and 210 pounds on Wednesday. After drinking about a gallon of cool water from the inside fountain, I replaced some of that lost weight.

Two nurses asked each of us standard questions they read from a form:

“Do you know who you are, and why you are here? (YES).

“Do you fear being beat up or sexually assaulted while you are here?” (NO).

“Do you intend to beat up or sexually assault anyone while you are here?” (NO).

“You aren’t thinking about suicide, are you?” (NO).

“Have you ever attempted suicide or harmed yourself?” (NO).

“Are you under psychiatric treatment or care?” (NO).

“Do you have any skin diseases, sores, or skin lesions?” (NO).

“Do you know how to seek medical care and access sickcall?” (YES).

As I answered their questions, I smiled to myself and wondered what they would do had I given the opposite answers instead. After all those hours in the bus, then hours waiting outside before going inside, we had to endure more threats concerning using the bathroom, urinals only, one-by-one, row-by-row, or it would be closed. One elderly man told the officer that he was sick, could not hold it, and had defecated in his pants while sitting there.

That revelation sparked more abuse and humiliating remarks from the guard. “That’s a shitty thing to do,” “What do you want me to do about it?” and “Just sit there for awhile.” Another officer sent an inmate orderly to the laundry for a pair of boxers and pants. Eventually the sick person was allowed to clean himself up.

A couple hours later, back outside, waiting for our bunk assignments, the second officer made a rare apology for the first officer’s actions, saying it was wrong to heap humiliation on the prisoner in front of everyone, that every week at least two people get off the arriving buses vomiting and sick from eating the bologna sandwiches in the bag lunches provided by the previous institution, that it wasn’t the prisoner’s fault he’d become sick.

At five PM, settled in, we went to supper in the distant chowhall under threat of dark gray storm clouds. I’m not going to tell you what we ate. You wouldn’t believe me. While we ate, the storm clouds unleashed lightning and pounding rain, stranding us in the chowhall until it had passed over. They weren’t concerned about us getting wet, but the lightning play hell with their fence alarms, and if one of us got struck by lightning, the state would be held liable to our survivors for damages. So we sat awhile. Supper was temporarily suspended.

A couple hours later, surprisingly, it had cleared up, and they called us to go to the rec yard canteen. Another prisoner told me I was wasting my time lining up, that my canteen debit card wouldn’t be activated yet, but I didn’t care. I needed the walk, the chance to be out in the open air, to see the sky, the trees outside the fences, the birds flying.

Miraculously. as if to reward my optimism, a bright rainbow  formed in the east, a colorful semicircle ringing the sky, reaching down to the tree line, followed by a second rainbow above the first, framing the distant landscape. The long canteen line of prisoners and the supervising guards stopped to stare in wonder at the sight, until it faded and disappeared fifteen minutes later.

When I returned to the dorm empty-handed, another prisoner said, “Wasted trip, huh?” I replied, “Not at all,” smiled to myself, and got in another line for the phone, to call my long-suffering wife, Libby, to let her know I was okay. Better than okay, I felt redeemed.

I told her that during that long trip across North Florida on Interstate 10, I was humbled at the thought of her repeated sacrifices, driving those long distances through monotonous thickets of undergrowth lining the highway to visit me. One trip wiped me out — true, she drives a much more comfortable vehicle, her Kia Soul, “Miss Daisy,” but her repeated six-hour treks each way from Jacksonville on the Atlantic coast, to Okaloosa, on the Gulf of Mexico, proved a rare love and dedication for me.

DAY THREE

Today is Thursday, August 14, 2014. I had expected to spend only one night here, at Lake Butler, and proceed to Central Florida Reception Center in Orlando early this morning, but the guard, like the Passover Angel, passed me by. Perhaps I will spend the weekend here and ride south on Monday, which is my preference, since I am temporarily near Jacksonville. Libby can make a much shorter drive to visit me here, an unexpected bonus.

This morning we had “mandatory rec,” and were herded out of the dorm to the swampy rec yard. I found a bench beneath a small wood pavilion and began writing this update. Fifty yards away, on the other side of the razorwire fences, birds perched in pines and a dozen other varieties of trees called and sang for me. At least I felt their songs were for me. It didn’t seem as though anyone else noticed, but I tried to squeeze every bit of perception from the scene. Rain frogs called from nearby hiding places. Two dozen sparrows hurriedly pecked at a discarded biscuit. A tiger swallowtail butterfly flew inside the fence, flitted past me, thought better of it, and flew back toward the woods it came from.

Still not certain of my destination, I will patiently bear any burdens they place on me, and thank God for the fervent prayers of those who are observing this journey. Some positive things are happening on multiple fronts, especially with some new, favorable rules affecting the parole commission, which recently changed its name to the “Florida Commission on Offender Review” (FCOR). Hopefully, the rules change and name change will auger a positive change in my release date.

Charlie

ADDENDUM:  I wrote “The Bluebird of Sadness” some time ago, based on other prison trips, but the sentiments remain the same. I asked Libby to reprint it here:

THE BLUEBIRD OF SADNESS

By Charles Patrick Norman

The prison bus, the Bluebird of Sadness, greets us

inside the fenced sallyport gate with rear door open,

beckoning like the black maw of the Beast, trudge now

up the three flimsy metal steps to your fate.

Fifty men pack into the Bluebird struggling with our

mesh bags of meager belongings: hopeless trial transcripts,

Dear John letters, flip-flops, empty deodorants, Gideon Bibles

given out by do-gooders like magic protective talismans,

stacking ourselves in broken seats, rusted shelves without

upholstery, steel grates bolted over windows, no escape,

shipped like UPS boxes with leg irons, signed for,

except UPS deliverymen don’t pack pistols and shotguns.

The old diesel wheezes, the guard/driver grinds gears,

stomps the brakes, laughs at laws of inertia staggering

those left standing, catching their balance on seat backs

and shoulders, bracing themselves for the eight-hour

transport to another anonymous fenced-in pasture, a prison

not unlike the last one, or the ones before, or after.

The heaving, rocking Bluebird of Sadness groans, complains

up the incline interstate entrance ramp, melds into

a racing river of rubber and steel cans filled with

citizens traveling in parallel lives, staring straight ahead,

talking on cell phones or nodding their heads to silent

music beamed from satellites, oblivious to their destinies,

Or the Bluebird of Sadness packed with lost souls on

their way to Purgatory, different destinations, yet the same.

We dread/desire the crash, the out-of-control Bluebird

of Sadness tumbling along the highway, scattering speeding

citizens to the Four Winds like ninepins or dandelions,

the blue-clad, chained sacrificial rams rotating like plaid

shirts, socks, blouses, trousers inside the clothes dryer,

padlocked, unable to escape the inevitable flames.

We plant our heads against window grates to get a better look

at cars and citizens zipping past us to the left, an occasional

glimpse of legs and thighs that generates hoots and catcalls from men

whose only solace comes from their imaginings or other men.

Bladders fill and men form lines in the aisle to a metal funnel

mounted waist-high at the back of the bus, connected to a tube that

drains through a hole in the floor, dribbling noxious urine

onto the pavement at sixty miles per hour, Lexus, BMW, Benz,

Nissan, Kia and Chevrolet plowing through yellow mist unaware.

Swerves and surges tumble one lost soul from his attempted

perch over the funnel, spraying others, curses, shoves,

and fists swinging, grumbles, buttons up his wet trousers

(no zippers allowed in prison), staggers past other full bladders

in the aisle, takes his rusty, broken seat, awaits the coming fences,

open gates drawing in the Bluebird of Sadness and her

load of flesh, to feed the monster, Moloch, once again.

Copyright 04/16/2013  all rights reserved

 

Libby and Charlie at Lake Butler West

Saturday, August 16, 2014

   

HERE'S A NEW POEM FROM CHARLIE

Editor's note: As parents know, sometimes incidents from our children's growing up years that seem dire when they occur look much different from the perspective of years later. I hope you like this poem. Libby

JUST OUT OF REACH

A poem by Charles Patrick Norman

A rusted barbed wire fence separated our

backyard from Mister Bonham’s forty-acre

cow pasture ruled by Big Red, a White-faced

Hereford bull, called that because

of the curly-blond locks that grew upward

to where massive horns sprouted, jutting

out from the sides of his towering head.

I longed to climb the apple tree a hundred

feet away, deep within the forbidden zone

where we were not allowed to play

or go, upon penalty of facing our mother’s

wrath, or threats of the minotaur’s goring.

I had run the gauntlet short weeks before,

but unripened green fruit, so sour, puckered my lips.

Now-ripe red orbs beckoned to a seven-year old boy,

Siren song calling across the empty field of grass,

Big Red and his harem far on the other side.

Surely Eve faced no greater temptation when

offered to partake of the tree bearing knowledge

of good and evil in that lost garden, and

neither was I any stronger than she had been.

A fair fall day, sun shining, my brother, Dan, not

yet three, slightly-built, stood beside me,

both of us barefoot and shirtless, hands on

the fencing, we stared at the apple tree. Do you

want to help me pick some apples? Of course

he nodded, smiling, safe, our mother tending baby Tom.

I held up the bottom wire and we scuttled through.

How many enchanted children had climbed those

gnarled branches before me I could not comprehend,

in harvest seasons come and gone. The bounty

belonged to us now, the only question how to get

the luscious fruit from high above to down below

without bruising. Hold out your hands, Dan,

I said, Catch it! He tried, apples bouncing

off his tiny hands, hitting his head

and tumbling to the ground, oh well.

Here’s another, Dan, try to catch it. Bounce,

hit, roll, didn’t matter, he was all right

at least he had broken the apple’s fall.

When we had four I climbed even higher

to pluck two more. We should have gone.

Just a little higher, just out of reach, I stretched

for the best one yet, a dark red apple

so perfect  in color, shape and form I had

to have it. The tree lured me past reason.

I heard Dan, far below, call, Charles,

then Charles again, before I looked down to

see him pointing, repeating one word, Bull, bull!

I looked out through branches and leaves swaying.

Dan called out, Bull! again. My heart

double-thumped at the sight of Big Red

rumbling toward us, dual horns held high,

faster and faster he came to deal with interlopers

invading his territory. Throat constricted in dread,

I couldn’t call out, then finally screamed, Run, Dan, Run!

Scattered apples forgotten, I jumped the last few feet,

fell, scrambled up and ran after my little brother, who

cried out, making uh, uh, uh sounds. I saw

his little legs, pumping so fast they seemed to blur

as I passed him, running with all my might

toward the barbed wire fence an eternity away.

Too afraid to look back, I felt the earth tremble in dread.

No time to slow, I dove head first beneath

the wire, slid on my stomach, felt steel

talons slice long thin lines down my bare back.

At last I looked back at Dan, so small, so fast,

face contorted, eyes wide, Big Red behind him, closing

distance. Run, Dan, Run! I screamed again. Holding

up the bottom wire fencing for him, he barely ducked

his head and was through — except a barb snagged

the waist band at the back of his little drawers —

he was caught! — or so he thought, and screamed,

thinking Big Red had him, running in place, another tug,

then he was free. Big Red pulled up, snorted, turned away,

done with us this day. Then we saw our mother on

the back porch, jaws clenched, not done with us at all.

ANOTHER LIFE AND DEATH IN PRISON

June 28, 2014

I met Carl while standing in a long prison canteen line last summer. At least thirty prisoners waited ahead of me, only one canteen window was open, it was hot, and dark storm clouds to the south moved our way. One lightning bolt and the accompanying thunderclap would be all it took for the disagreeable guard to clear the yard and send us back to our buildings.

“No talking!  I catch you talking, you go to the back of the line.” The guard walked along the queue, ears tuned for any conversation. One prisoner toward the front grumbled, wondering why we couldn’t even speak, outside, in line.

“You, back of the line!” He would never make it.

Behind me an old man groused and cursed guttural German swear words. I didn’t understand the words, despite a couple of years of German language study. Charles Berlitz didn’t teach such phrases. You would have to visit a sailors’ bar in Hamburg or a prison in North Florida to hear such angry vehemence. I smiled. Despite my own frustration, I had learned to remain silent, rather than attract the unwanted attention of an overbearing prison guard. Carl exercised no such restraint. Amazingly, the guard ignored him.

The canteen line guard hurried across the yard to intercept some miscreant who had tried to take a shortcut across the grass.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing walking on my grass?”

Out came the handcuffs. The guard manhandled the prisoner toward the captain’s office. The canteen line was forgotten. A couple of disrespectful men strode to the front of the line, evoking curses from the ones they’d cut in front of. Men have been killed for less in prison.

Conversations erupted, like the talk button had been turned on. I looked back at the man behind me, now cursing the line jumpers. With anger like that, he was a candidate for a stroke, I thought. Being polite, I said something to him about rarely meeting Germans in prison. He introduced himself, Carl, suddenly friendly, proud to be recognized as German. I told him that some of my mother’s ancestors had come to America from Germany in 1733. Suddenly, we were homeboys.

There was a time in my life when I expected to die young. My life had gone to hell, FBI agents told me that a cadre of cops were plotting to kill me, would I cooperate with them? No! Then I was charged with a murder someone else had committed three years before, and shortly found myself in jail, a lawyer telling me if I didn’t plead guilty to a lesser charge, the state would seek the death penalty.

When someone threatens to strap you down in a wooden chair and electrocute you, you tend to take such threats seriously. When their efforts to execute you fail, but you still face life in a grim prison more dangerous than the worst city in America, where you see men die as a part of daily life, your thoughts focus more on surviving the nights and days rather than long-term retirement plans. After having survived over three decades in such prisons, having gone from being a young man in his twenties with his life ahead of him to an old man in his sixties who had outlived most of his family and friends, you take notice of men who are even older than you are.

I looked at Carl’s ID card clipped to his shirt. Not only was he older than I, but I could tell from his D.C. number that he’d been in prison years longer than I had.

People who have served decades of imprisonment are members of an exclusive fraternity, “The Survivors,” men who have refused to die, against the odds. Old “convicts,” as opposed to young “inmates,” grant a grudging respect toward each other. Each of us had survived what few could have.

Today’s prisons are divided and subdivided into separate units by “the system,” to maintain its obsession with “control,” so I rarely saw Carl, except in the occasional canteen or chow line. That prison obsession with control meant that men could rarely converse in long waiting lines, even outside, but during our infrequent conversations, I realized that “Mr. Carl,” as some called him, or “Old Man Carl,” as did others, was an unhappy person, always irritated and complaining, causing some to refer to him as “that old crab.”

We were opposites in that regard, despite similarities in age and length of imprisonment. Apparently Carl had strangled his wife and hid her body in his septic tank in Miami forty years before, and his life had gone downhill from there. He was perpetually angry.

On the other hand, despite having served all these years in prison, I maintained a positive attitude and outlook which I can only explain and attribute to my faith in God and hope for eventual redemption, exoneration and freedom. Early in my imprisonment a Christian minister had told me that I had been spared for a reason, and God had a plan for my life. It seemed that guardian angels in the forms of decent men and women continually entered my life, encouraging, uplifting, and helping me travel a little further on this difficult path. I had been blessed with the love of a wonderful woman for the past dozen or so years, and enjoyed a level of happiness that escaped miserable Carl. But this isn’t about my spiritual journey. It is about the unlikely circumstances that led up to Carl’s painful and lingering death from kidney cancer in a prison infirmary, and the unlikely prisoner who comforted and accompanied him to the end.

I spent twenty-nine days in solitary for a trumped-up charge by a disgruntled guard that was eventually overturned on appeal to the warden. I live in an “open” dorm, which is a sparse building the size of a convenience store packed with stacks of bunks filled by seventy-five or so prisoners. Close quarters. No privacy. At this moment, sitting on my bunk writing, I could reach out and touch eight bunks that surround mine. I put on my radio headphones and crank up the volume to try to block out some of the endless, inane chatter. Upon my return to B-dorm, as it is called, the Re-entry dorm for men preparing for release, I noticed that my friend, Jesse, had not been in the dorm all that day. You have to be on your bunk during the infinite body counts. He wasn’t there.

“He’s in the infirmary,” a neighbor said.

“What happened? Is he sick?”

“No, he’s helping some old guy who’s dying.”

“Oh, yeah? That was unusual.

The next day, Jesse  returned to the dorm to pick up clean clothes. We talked.

“Mr. Carl” had terminal cancer, and only a short time to live. He was in the infirmary, a small glassed-in room in the medical building with two rows of bunks for sick prisoners. Other prisoners are assigned as orderlies, with no special training, only mopping floors, cleaning up, and serving meal trays. Carl was dying, he needed someone to attend him, but he had cussed out and yelled at every prisoner the nurses or guards had sent in to tend him. Even dying, he was angry and intimidating. No one wanted anything to do with him.

Carl told a classification officer who came to check on him that he wanted to talk to someone about God. The woman called in Jesse and explained the problem. The fact that she thought of Jesse in the first place is the result of another unlikely story. Having served over twenty years in prison, and in his forties, Jesse had spent most of those twenty years raising hell and getting in trouble, until about three years before, when he experienced a religious conversion, becoming a dedicated Christian who unabashedly shared his newfound faith with others, both prisoners and staff. Volunteering to assist a dying man like Carl, staying with him in the infirmary twenty-four hours a day, helping him use the bathroom and bathe, feeding him, listening to and talking with him, was a challenge no one else was willing to undertake.

“I hate God,” Carl told Jesse. Jesse returned to B-dorm each morning for a little while and kept me posted on  Carl’s quickly worsening health. In response to Carl’s rants against a God he claimed to hate, Jesse read passages from his Bible, reciting verses about the love and life of Jesus.

“How much time does he have left?” Jesse asked the doctor.

“Not much,” the doctor said. “He should have died already.”

Still, Carl held on, ranting, angry, but his attitude was softening.

“Tell me more about this man, Jesus,” he said.

Jesse felt that God had put him in that place as a test of his faith, a chance to be an instrument of God’s will. He had badly screwed up his own life, and faced with this old man dying, fading before his eyes, he was determined not to let Carl die without hearing the words that had provoked a spiritual awakening in his own life. The more Jesse read the Bible to Carl, the more Carl listened, and the less he ranted.

Before he died, Carl told Jesse that he no longer hated God, but loved Jesus, had made his peace, and was ready to meet his Maker. He’d confessed his long-standing sins to God, and been forgiven. He was, at last, at peace.

“Stay with me,” Carl said, in his last hours. He had been alone for forty years, but in his last moments of life, he had two companions, Jesse and Jesus.

Two hours later, Jesse was back in his bunk in B-dorm. Physically, he was wiped out, but spiritually, he was elated. He had helped a lost soul find his way, and in doing so, his own life had been changed almost as much as Carl’s. How could it not have been?

Charlie

Editor’s Note: Carl Eierle, DC #038075, born February 22, 1936, died of cancer, June 16, 2014, at Okaloosa C.I. He had been imprisoned since 1977. Few mourned his passing, besides Jesse and Charlie. May he finally rest in peace and not be alone.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, JOSEPH BRODSKY

July 3, 2014

I try to get my daily poetry fix from Garrison Keillor’s, The Writer’s Almanac, on public radio when I can, but often must rely on Libby to print and mail them to me to read. Since we got married on Saturday, May 24, 2014, and I was in the visiting park when the broadcast for that day played, I paid particular attention to that day’s copy, to the interesting literary facts Garrison always includes. Sometimes, I feel a connection to people he talks about, as I did on this day.

May 24 was the birthday (1940) of poet, Joseph Brodsky, born in Leningrad in the communist Soviet Union. He lived during a time of great suffering and poverty, when the Nazis conducted the Siege of Leningrad during World War II. After reading Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground, as a teen, he began writing and publishing poems.

At 23, he was charged with “malicious parasitism” and arrested by the KGB, the Soviet secret police. When he testified in court, his testimony was copied down and smuggled out of Russia.

The judge asked him, “Who told you that you were a poet? Who assigned you that rank?”

Brodsky answered, “No one. Who assigned me to the human race?”

The judge sent him to a Siberian labor camp for five years, but his testimony only made him more famous.

After he returned to Leningrad, he tried to make a living as a poet, but everything he did angered the authorities.

That scenario resonates with me: angering repressive authorities with my poetry. I spent thirty days in solitary confinement because one hateful mail clerk didn’t think I should be allowed to write poems, despite what the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights, says.

While I was in solitary, I sent and received legal mail from my attorney, William Sheppard. The civilian mail clerk, the same person who fabricated the disciplinary report that put me in lockup, was required by prison rule to pick up any outgoing legal mail each day. I asked in vain to have my long letter explaining what had happened to my lawyer picked up over the course of days, finally being forced to file an official complaint to force her to do what the law required.

When the vulgar woman came to my cell, I pushed my letter through the door crack to her. She began reading my mail, which I protested to the accompanying guard. She mumbled something to him and stormed off. The officer began laughing. Being a decent sort, I asked him what she said.

“She said you were a f-----g poet.”

Everyone doesn’t like my poetry, just like the Communists didn’t appreciate Joseph Brodsky’s expressions. One day the KGB got fed up with Joseph Brodsky’s intransigence, and put him on a plane to Vienna, kicking him out of the Soviet Union. Professors and poets took Brodsky under their wings, taking him to America, where he met great success, winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1987.

I don’t have any designs on the Nobel Prize, but if the prison KGB wants to kick me out to get me out of their hair, I won’t complain a bit. I will thank Joseph Brodsky for his sacrifices and for showing me his way.

In honor of him, I would like to say, Happy Birthday, Joseph! And I offer you this poem I wrote today.

Best regards to all,

Charlie

SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME

Someone, please tell me how it feels

to stand beneath a tree at night,

the only illumination

being twinkling stars and moonlight,

the darkness alive with bird calls:

horned owls, nighthawks and whippoorwills.

Tell me, please, do the cicadas

sing their choruses, rapturous

in their joy to be alive now,

in this moment, riding the waves

of time to the shore, guaranteed

only this night forevermore?

While the summer breeze rustles leaves,

tell me if you feel your heart race

in anticipation of love,

of soft footsteps, soon approaching,

two shadows join in rendezvous,

Someone, please tell me how it feels.