Day Release

Strangely, what recurred for this topic at first

was just one image : a hot bush road

in daylight, an old man and a young

waiting outside the prison gate together

for their bus or lift to some Toastmaster

meeting in the town. Driving past, I thought

they were a father and son, the younger

at a writing workshop having told me that

it made it so much easier, his dad

being in that prison, too. There was such

a quiet, perceptive tone about that group, such

knowledge of their enemy: depression, such

eagerness to have their work discussed.

The next recurrence is that of my theories, one

I had working with the Torture and Trauma Rehab.unit:

that if one is traumatised early, one's life

starts with a terror of hierarchy, so that

for the rest of it one bounces back and forth

between high and low status, perhaps

finding some answer in sex or art, because

these allow dominance and submission

to be simultaneous. An earlier theory I had

about the problem of evil during McNamara's War

in Vietnam was that reality/immediacy and

ideal/illusion are both killers

unless mixed together evenly - that

immersion in either the physical or rhetorical

will lead to some deadly nonescape.

Landscape of nonescape always does

oppress with so much cosy detail. It fits

that Mt.Penang became so art and crafty, not

a prison but a place for jam and verse.

Reading there with an ashen Adamson,

I said the place would only be remembered

because people like him had been imprisoned there.

But the place's spirit-of-place was still overlit, caging

and bad. Bad is a good adjective -not used often

enough but apt for many places, not applying

so much to people, who'll slither around

too much in hierarchical swinging. Daylight

is a swamp in some places, you can hear

the venom in it singing.