A Post-Prison Poem

Thoughts of a Human Time Capsule

I have been away a while,

for many numbered nights and days.

It's okay to ask me questions about.

One thing you lose is modesty,

after half a lifetime doffing

your privates to uniformed strangers.

People seem somehow smaller now, sun-dried. Do they know that it looks like they're desiccating as we speak, canted luminously forward, and belittled by the occasional blue-white shutterless flash? I'll say this: things feel all wrong. Simply making a phone call's tricky. Shops claim to no longer recognize me. The scenery's so bright and busy, almost abject in its vacuity. It's a challenge to focus for long. Then come the silent nights, so still that all you can do is dream up sounds to be concerned about: creeping footsteps, distant key jingles. Closets aren't made for sleeping, yet here I lie, reservedly breathing. Brave new world – verging on unworldly – wireless everything, endlessly witnessing, doomscrolling, streaming, disconnected. I'm freighted with a past but carry as one solitary point of pride a browser history that's pristine. * * * * * Years before I wrote this poem (which itself was years ago), I pleased myself by observing that someone who received a really long prison sentence essentially became a human time capsule, containing all of their earlier life and toting it around inside themselves indefinitely. Imagining myself as such a receptacle for era-specific miscellanea held some appeal. Yes, I could've conjured a more romantic image for the poem – "a man in amber," for instance – but the purposefulness of a container buried in the earth, with a carefully curated collage of today's civilization inside of it, better jibed with my sensibilities. Decades of popular entertainment, from The Shawshank Redemption to Tulsa King, have exploited the human drama of former prisoners' return to the free world. Writing Thoughts of a Human Time Capsule basically amounts to an acknowledgment of my interest in this plot device. For obvious reasons, it could even be said to preoccupy me. Just yesterday I learned that my friend Jim, my crossword-puzzling compatriot from the Old-Man Table was finally paroled. I felt so happy for him. Our fellow tablemate Larry, whom a parole board said would die in prison, was released two years ago. Thinking about the struggles these men now face concerns me even as the fact of their release raises my spirits. Both have close family who care very much about them – a critical component of post-release success – but the world they've entered is decades away from the one they left behind.

Jim and Larry are the time capsules my poem speaks for. So is everyone who survives many years in prison before being jettisoned into your world. The emotional and factual toll of that experience is one that I pity as much as envy.