In the Old
Administration Segregation—
I once believed there was
NO WAY
I would see the millennium come
and go from
inside the penitentiary.
That would be heresy,
a crime against humanity.
It was.
The date came and went, left me
in a cloud of correctional dust, speechless,
disgruntled, sick of being hopeful when
hope only mocked me.
i.
Three decades,
a desk in the law library, prison counsel,
big dog to a multitude of yippers
whose options ran out years ago:
my drop is Closed Cell Restriction,
the violators, escapists, killers
of other prisoners, ex-cops, cop-
killers, locked up 23/7, left
to introspection and petty games
undermining the guy in the next cell,
or the next tier, or the inmate preacher
who makes rounds twice a week, or
the officer who watches the tier, or
the woman who passes out medication.
Gamers with time to dream up games.
The brothers three: Frank, Jess,
Sonny “Bones” James.
I mean, how can you not be a gangster,
named after gangsters?
Old man Lee, C-Tier, cell 1,
stabs someone every time the screws
transfer him to population. So they don’t.
What are you doing, Lee? I ask
when I make rounds. Oh, just waiting to
die. He smiles but means it.
Brumfield weighs a ton and takes a ton
of pills to help him live. He doesn’t want
to live down the walk: too many disrespectful
loudmouth youngsters. If they send me down
the walk I’ll teach them punks respect, then
they’ll send me back here where I belong,
he swears
he’ll do it, if he has to.
Some are dangerous, some are all mouth.
I’m a counsel. I know their cases. I know
who to bullshit, who to steer clear of.
Silent Miguel has ties to the cartel
I always stop because he’s always
awake and one hell of an artist,
his sheets and chalks splayed across
the bunk, never too into it to break
for a quick visit that amounts to praise
for his colorful creations and little else.
I heap it on because he’s masterful
and maybe, I hope, generous to fans.
He’s not, it turns out, but I like Miguel.
I like most of my block-bound children
even if some of them demand I file
something, anything, that will rescue them.
Ain’t no saving the godless, y’all.
Ain’t no saving the goddam godless.
Harold thinks he was in the Dixie Mafia.
I read about him. Talked to a real DM.
Harold was a peripheral pain in nuts.
He’s a hypochondriac, chronic plaintiff.
Enigmatic Jon, bonafide serial rapist,
more time than any Louisiana prisoner.
When they caught him he admitted it all,
unwilling to traumatize the 80+ victims with
a trial, he said. Mighty considerate of him.
Pled guilty, waived
appeals, landed in a six-by-nine
on CCR at Angola.
Can’t let you out, Jon. Not never.
You’re a career-killer. I let you out,
I’m done. This way, you’re done.
He’s no fool.
Fascinating guy, even brilliant.
I long to pick his brain but
it seems inappropriate. You’d never
known he did what he did but he did
and admits it with no joy. He didn’t kill
anyone, just invaded their souls.
I wonder, who is more dangerous,
the man who rapes, or the killer next door?
George waits by the bars.
He has one arm but the nub doesn’t know it.
George paints flowers with colored markers,
white handkerchiefs his canvas, visitors
to the tier his critics. You got another red
marker? My red marker’s runnin outta ink.
George was a kid when the old con conned
him into a fateful escape; the warden himself
blew the kid’s arm off, laid the old con
in the dirt. Twenty years George has been
in a cell. All he wants is a red marker.
Oh they live
and breathe
and play their
games and loudcap and paint
and stir the shit, but where is the life here?
This place is a zoo and the animals
talk and hang in the bars and watch television
while time ticks away and their cells are
their tombs, tombs hidden in the prison’s
rusty gut, rusting the flesh right off their bones.
Some men have been caged for decades
(the Angola 3), others have decades
to go (Jon), all are animals in the zoo.
I know your futures. I know the day and
hour of your liberation, or death. Like God.
ii.
And Then There Is
the last of the old breed, the dying dinosaur:
bad liver, bad back, left eye dull and blind,
bone-thin, tall as an undertaker,
inked from one end to the other—White Power,
dagger, swastika, R.I.P., bare-breasted barfly
whose boobs loll slightly off-kilter—still
combing gray hair too sparse to comb:
one crazy mother, high when he can be, pissed
when he can’t, the implausible terminus
untamed after 40 in and proud of it.
Cons buy moods from Slim. Garbage drugs,
generic anti-seizure and relaxers, nothing
to brag about but they soften the mood and
they need that. The pills make them sociable,
help them laugh, a buck apiece,
payable in canteen or contraband
smokes. They don’t show up on piss tests.
(Eight pills for breakfast and the day flows:
awake in the wee hours, breathless, counting
down to the next handful of oblong peace.)
Slim’s the orderly. He sways glassy-eyed
in a nonexistent breeze in the middle of the dorm,
death-grip on his broom handle, loaded to the gills.
His life is jails & prisons, a juvenile offender,
escape artist, repeat f-up. He has no tales
that aren’t crime-rooted,
no life beyond wasting life
but it’s his life and who else can judge
(except the judge)? He schemes to go home
but secretly, I think, he knows he’s already there
and the people of the world will never let him out.
He cut a man’s throat. Says he didn’t. But he did.
Slim whispers his plot to revolt against
Angola’s high indignity, legislative
indifference; force in the feds to shake this mutha
up. He’ll slice his arms. His friends will slice theirs.
In rush the media, it’s a huge scandal, what
the hell is going on in Angola? He won’t
work, his friends won’t work, they’ll shut
the place down and the people will beg them to please
tell us what’s wrong! That’s the out, Slim says.
Things will change, Slim says. Except,
they won’t. Give him 10 minutes and the plot
is forgotten. He sways on his broom handle, the last
dinosaur, waiting for the cataclysmic end.
watercolor and graphite on laid paper. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)
iii.
Like the Close of a Silent Flick
my memory clock-click-click STOPs at 1989.
No one has aged, not Dad nor Mom nor
my siblings; my grandmother died looking
the same as she did when I fell and went away.
Except
appearing in my brother’s slightly tight street
clothes and leg irons, I didn’t recognize the corpse
in the casket, and everyone had grown so gray,
bald and fat with outstretched hands and silent
for 30 years, a surreality unable to overcome that
filmstrip continuously clacking through my mind,
memories now idealized, stylized, idolized but
probably as much production as actuality.
Even the blue-eyed girl has been with me every day:
I loved her before I knew her name, the giggling twig
who colors my youth, the angry ex from whose
consternation I melted abruptly decades ago.
She’s still stunning, her spirit still glows, she is the
gauge by which I live inside my head.
Except
we are not what we were, nothing remains the same.
My memories stop at 1989. I keep them alive so
I won’t disappear.
iv.
Then Came the Bug:
We snagged a bittersweet
rumination, a conflagration of clearer skies,
more clever lies to bedevil angry maskwearers.
Every time we coughed we fell dead.
The virus was everywhere, creating
snotnosed zombies lounging in the apocalypse.
They locked the doors, the gates, their minds
before we could catch a breath—don’t breathe
they ordered or you’ll morph into a grave.
The first one down, round, bearded, bad
knees, wheelchair bound, caught the killer
in the wind, took a ride to the outside
where he signed a DNR—did he realize
what it was? Was his death wish imminent?
Do not resuscitate if things go south:
They didn’t when they did. See ya,
gotta plant ya in the cold cursed earth
beneath your state-issue number.
He wouldn’t be the last, they dropped quick
fast and in a hurry we buried them deep
said a few muffled words and got the hell
out of the cemetery: Wouldn’t wanna be ya.
Hard to evade the unseen pursuer.
Easy to imagine our number in concrete.
brush and black ink over watercolor on wove paper. (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington)
v.
Locked in this Steel Menagerie
grown men wallow
in the wrath of depraved society that
rejects our liberty and, ironically, perceives
itself a good and just god. How mocking,
the whims of gods.
Poor misguided folk, go the way of gods,
perish beneath the vigor of unnamed sins.
Harvests that fill your coffers today blanket
your grave tomorrow. Soon there will be none
left toward which to point the finger—the sole
survivor will pirouette a circle of self-defeat.
That’s what happens to gods.
That’s what happens to fools
who can’t see beyond their eminence.
What awaits in the refuge of saints?
What fate can we assimilate that will bring us
to our beginnings? Meaningless words and thrills
fill our cups and rain like spilled blood on the ground,
the highway, the endless highway to nowhere.
No need to turn up your nose, fluff your face, hide
your eyes: you built this horror, you and your sibling
sycophants so precious and protected:
what architects you are! What artists!
What a bleak, black, baleful masterpiece
you’ve sculpted Wallow in your pride, my brothers.
Wallow where the soul cries and dies, feel the helplessness
of those you condemn as easily as watering the lawn.
Easier. Turn on a sprinkler and doom a race. What pride
you must feel.
Inside lives a cancer, dining at the fabric of innocence
until only thread remains. Cancer. I’ve seen it tear out
the hearts of good men, good women. I’ve feared it but
only the undeserving perish. Those who deserve the pain
live until their poison infects the rest of us and we die
moment by moment, we eat ourselves from within.
Like parasites. Like the disease we are.
Where are you, noble cause?
In the shadows, in the pretense?
Where lies justice? Compassion has flown
and men throttle their wives for the mere sake
of watching evil roll across the land.
What pathetic times these are. What puny petty people.
You ask why I am bitter. Why the hell shouldn’t I be?
Rip me, tear me, cast me away, step on me, degrade me,
burn, beat, blacken me, steal from me, deny me, betray me,
then ask me why I am bitter?
Tirades through the avenues and chambers above the sea.
Parallel swirls in octagon caverns summon from secret places.
What sensible soul should go? I see waves and mountains
and snow and Colorado skies, Texas toddlers, Louisiana pain.
I see futures and pasts and life rushing toward its close but
no one seems to notice and I can do nothing.
Come see me, please. It’s been so long.
Not that it particularly matters.
I’ve grown too old, cold inside.
They won’t let me go and I’m so cold inside.
John Corley was born in Shreveport, moved to Florien at 14, graduated Florien High in 1980. Went to work in the offshore drilling industry in 1981. Was arrested in 1989, ultimately convicted in 1996 as a first felony offender by a nonunanimous jury of second degree murder, sentenced to mandatory life without parole. “This is my 35th year of incarceration,” he told The Lens. “My prison record is impressive, and includes an associate’s degree, seven years as a paralegal, and 20 years as a journalist. My hope and belief is still strong that I will someday rejoin society.” Corley is currently the editor of The Angolite, Louisiana State Penitentiary’s prison news magazine.
Corley and Nick Chrastil from The Lens also traded email on JPay, the prison’s email system, for a longer interview about his work and life.