Letter to a Prisoner with Black and Pink

What I wanted to write:

Dear Keysha Bird,

My heart began pounding
As I began to register the request on the postcard:
Write a greeting to a prisoner

There you were
Your name and id number on the recipient box

I stared at the blankness of the tiny rectangle box
And wondered at the immediacy of the whole thing:
You were not in my life only a second ago
And now I will put you in my life simply by writing to you

I don’t even write to my sister
Yet here I am debating what to write to you

What is it that I can say to you?
I don’t know your story
I don’t know you

I only sense
There is a good chance the System failed you
was set up to fail you
(How else to explain this Nation’s damning prison stats?)US_incarceration_timeline-clean-fixed-timescale.svg
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What do I write?
Reminding you of the harshness of your walls seems feckless and
poetry too esoteric

Yet poetry saves me
Certainly
It is a cushion when my nose is up against a wall
A reminder there is beauty
A softness in life
A give
That I might eck out tenderness even in the hardest of places
Knowing my tough places have never been as unforgiving as the wall you stare at

I know of preachers activists mothers sons who write poetry from behind walls
In my note to you I forced a few lines of poetic encouragement
And prayed it didn’t come off patronizing

Truly I wanted to send you the well of tears bubbling inside of me
for you and
for countless yous prison-vs-population-stats
What use are metaphorical tears?

Then, how do I sign off
My formal name may as well be Mary
But my nickname is singular
You may find me
Quite easily
You may call me

In my harshest encounter with the State374551_552720131409612_1271824054_n
I cried
How I do not know how I had the wherewithal to not cry in the front of the insulting officers when I cry at most anything upsetting
My voice was shaky but somehow I refused the tears
My toes hurt from curling under so tightly
When I finally unclenched my hands, I saw little red moons in my palm
I cried afterwards

In a flash
the State becomes this unyielding unscalable invisible wall that slams against us
deadening all the fibers that make us up
We are reminded we can be stripped of everything
Our civil liberties appear as thin as tissue in face of the gleaming daring jeer in the Officers’ eyes
What rights?

Being threatened by the State is unlike anything else
And this experience of mine was just a brush
I was surrounded by friends yet felt so vulnerable
On my own porch I was threatened

It was devastating. That night poetry was smashed.

And here you sit day in day out
Toiling your best days away
Being “rehabilitated”

You may even take your time sincerely
You may have convinced yourself you are paying your dues back to society
And there may certainly be a place for that
But prison?

I am in no doubt
the State takes more than it should from you
your labor for a pittance

This State continues to be built on nothing short of slave labor
the latest iteration of the Plantation

And we learn to be docile, obedient even

As you bide your time
The State continues to fail you

I believe
The State needs to be on put on trial
for failing you when you were in swaddling clothes
The State was negligent in seeing you through to young adulthood
Even worse, the State is deliberately machinized to fail millions of yous
so you can be put away metaphorically forever
The paperwork against you guarantee this.
Rehabilitation is a hoax.

In your time of need
You possibly had no father
No mentor
No friend

Who could you trust?
who would watch your back?

Sometimes we just need that one Friend who can teach us
Just let’s bide our time patiently
Dreaming, working away and dreaming
Most importantly
That we keep dreaming
All the time watching for that opening
And when it appears
Gunning for it with measured pace

That one Friend who can tell us
We are significant
We are beautiful
We are kind
We are perfect as we are and the special unique different way we each are moved matter in this world
We are loved
Most of all
We are loved

Even as strangers – you and I, Keysha – we are connected
And every body in this whole world is connected to us
When any one of us is imprisoned, a bit of every person’s heart becomes caged like a little bird
May you struggle to keep free that bird in your heart
May I find grace in its freedom
My warmest to you this holiday season
Please know I am thinking on you with blessing

How now do I sign off as anything other than
Pampi Bird