Pentridge Prison Reflections

‘I wouldn’t have trusted,’ she said

about friendships I made

in the poetry workshops in prison.

‘I grew up with criminals,’ she said.

‘They were all charismatic!’

The thing is, my guys weren’t.

To me, they were just poets. 

I didn’t think to judge anything else.

Seeing that, they trusted me.

But later, when some got out?

I found there were those who did 

have a criminal mentality.

Then, the friendships dwindled

in quiet, regretful agreement.

Others, though, did not.

Inside the prison 

there was no way, nor reason

to know the difference. In there, 

we all – inmates and tutors –

shared the prison mentality.

Written in response to dVerse Poetics: Folsom Prison Blues, where we were invited to be inspired by Johnny Cash's song of that name. 

My books (memoir and poetry) about the Pentridge experience are soon to be on Amazon.

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Wandering Through the Prison

I am there in the walls of Pentridge

among the other ghosts. 

The face of my younger self

floats in and out of the stones.

I walk down the old paths

between the flower beds 

and in through the door

of the small prefab classroom.

But the paths and the classroom

are long gone, ghosts now as well.

Tourists who come are unaware

of that old reality’s exact details.

Ghosts of my friends linger too, 

brothers of my heart, my students

who taught me more than I taught them:

their younger selves, surviving.

I’m glad the place was closed. 

It carried much evil and only

a little good. Was evil in the men I met?

Perhaps. More in how they were treated.

We are all gone from there now,

out into other lives — except the one

still imprisoned. Except that other one

who died. Do we still meet in those corridors?

I like to think that even after I’m gone

to wherever we go when we leave,

some fragments of the selves we were

linger, weaving love through those old stones.