A Matter of Life and Death

On 27 September, 2018 Safe Ground

Producing a poetry piece for a ‘Matter of Life and Death’ symposium and had me reliving unrelinquished episodes along corridors, exercise yards, cells and prison wings still existing inside my head. 

The event sought answers to address numbers of deaths in secure settings. When reliving ground zero of a suicide, Ego was denied a ‘Visiting ‘Order,’ and only honesty allowed past security into reception and general population. 

Walking landings of the past. I exhumed memories of eating by toilets, snoring, cell thefts, danger, self-harming, knowledge nothing was private, believing all was recorded on a file, filed to use against me, fireworks in skies, straining necks to see, pictures of family, with smiles calling by sides, distant train horn calls, burning to escape on it, and sounds of traffic shouts, “Life is beyond walls, but you’re not part of it.”

At the same time, in my role with CRC Probation at Leicester Prison, considering delivery of spoken word poetry. A prisoner produced poems not dared to share. He censored poems, fearing wrath from key holders to freedom.  

Later outside high castle-like walls. I looked at the sun glinting from razor wire, and reflected, when in prison I self-censored too.

For the symposium I read and read statistics and created a piece full of statistics. In this I regurgitated findings, while neglecting the experience I lived. I tried to force words into creations and the result, a piece of regurgitated statistics, which I tried hammering into shape, but it did not work. It needed to be created from first-hand perspective, I mentally revisited the prison where my first suicide poem was written.

During my time in the prison system there were suicides and often the first sign of a death is being let out of cells one by one, or not at all. When a close friend took his own life. I heard an officer heave him down, and although I was numb, I wrote and what was written I shared in the symposium, ‘A Matter of Life and Death.’ 

RIP Asset

Everything is slow again today in May and when unlocked for showers one by one, an officer’s face reveals something is wrong. A prisoner is hanged, presumed dead, and although CPR no pulse is read. While in my dream and bed I snuggled, a mate fought for breath, struggled. He was an orderly, cleaner on servery, now crime scene tape barring cell entry. 

I still see his smiling face and fortitude to get him through this place. When we chatted yesterday he seemed ok, we even touched fist during the day. Happy-go lucky bouncing around landings, him going out like that defies understanding.

Why man? Why? I just can't get it. You seemed so stable and mentally fit. What took the hope from your smiley face and made you want an easy way out of this place? You did not have to suffer in silent pain with a long line of mates to listen, to explain…

Whatever it was we could have shared, but maybe you never knew how much I cared.

It goes without saying you'll be missed, I remember brews shared and us getting pissed.

But now I’ll always look around for your bouncing walk, although I pray that your spirit is beyond these walls.

Sonnet Over the Deep

Video

The vast ocean of healing waves that time contains has washed away rubber stamps demarking me has stock, while I have vigorously chiselled institutionalisation locks, so I will not wonder lonely as a solitary segregated cloud, fearing to put my foot down on dreamed up punitive policies.

I will speak the all too real realities now that I’ve unravelled glinting rolls of razor wire constricting vocal cords cutting deepest darkest thoughts. I will talk words like foreign bodies inserted into ecosystems of carnivorous thoughts, to cause reacting attacks and devouring of ideas along neural paths, so that collectively we can fashion words into sharp focal points of same vein onto pages of minds, and realise, such didactic discourse it beats uproar on House of Lords door demanding reform, 

Because we are born into the world with so much to offer, but within a capitalising mass production of assets off-setting taxes, we become just a number, in a place where men and women are walking around shell-shocked, numb, but mentally hyper-vigilant cocked guns, expecting hammers to drop, yet another loss, in a system where an afflicted victim ends up lying limp, before being zipped tight into a black bag and sent on a journey down a mortuary corridor and slid into a silently sliding draw, cold, alone, instead of in supportive arms at home. 

So I want to put in a Governor's Application to revisit the prison where my first poems were written, when John was alive and living and trying to hide or flee from his inner demons and not seeing people creeping until feeling that cast glass shattering his visage cutting fissures and sharp homemade shank knife glinting under harsh prison cell light.

Now I have to take an eternity of breaths, before stepping into an etched picture of a hanging corpse deeply scored into thoughts, along with heart shredding sounds echoing down long lineages of unjustly cut short family trees, and the deep grief from loss of life after entering a dark hungry hole and almost futile struggle to survive, when there could have been so many more positive sources of light, there could have been someone there by his side, teaching with artistic innovative methods as weapons and tools to not only survive, but thrive. 

Instead of feeling like a fool who stood looking up at upper crust crumbs, descending like dead stars and trying to stuff them into austere threadbare pockets along one of the broken pathways back behind bars, but what if a sonnet had hovered over the face of his deep and deposited a seed in his abject blankness? It would have grown a smorgasbord of thought sprawling branches, imagine if John had reached out a hand to grab artistic attributes divine and feasted on fruits of truth dangling right there on the vine.

His thoughts would have begun running ragged breaths until there was nothing left of a perpetuating cycle where life blood falls down DNA scrawled walls onto dirtily protesting defecated floors.

His life’s skies would have opened so wide a vast expansive boundless beyond, causing him to gaspingly choke agoraphobic breaths, instead, my friend, and is no longer an asset, he is dead.

On the day there were a number of performers and speakers, hosted by CEO Charlotte Weinberg, and included Brenda Birungi (AKA Lady Unchained), Jamal Khan, Richard Lamb, Jason Smith, Lucy Baldwin (Keynote Speaker), Imtiaz Amin, Deborah Coles (director of Inquest), Kelly Roberts, Stafford Scott, all with lived experience and a passion for justice. 

Alongside the art were challenging and constructive conversations from panellists including Annetta Bennett, Stafford Scott (The Monitoring Group), a representative from CALM, Imtiaz Amin (Zahid Mubarak Trust), Deborah Coles (Inquest), Tony Cealy, and Dr Kirstine Szifris.