From The Word Go

From The Word Go

They did not pass go because they could not read go.

Illiteracy is a disenfranchisement and monopoly of nothing,

They went straight to jail.

I see them every day.

See them stretched out on their bunks, doing time 24 / 7.

See them play dominoes;

white dots spilling across a table,

each man taking his share,

laying out blocks

zigzagging into the night,

hedging a gamble, soup, cigarettes,

dope, and blackmail,

knowing that blood will pay

if they lose and cannot cover their loses.

It costs 35,000 dollars a year to keep each of them here.

There are ten dormitories and each one writes off a hundred men.

When one man leaves there is always another man waiting for his bunk.

They will come back and back and back,

and their wives and children

will come and see them every other week.

There is no shame here.

Penance is something that rich people do.

Time is what people of color do.

They lost shame years ago.

This is Hell's Harvard.

I’d like to think that if in the 10^th grade

someone had bailed them out

with the hard love they deserved

fewer bondsmen would be taking a cut of their despair;

told them that prison was not what one does after elementary school;

had tended to the delinquency of their spirit

before it became the despair of their heart;

had told them they must earn their future and their future is now;

had given them bootstraps not shower sandals;

I’d like to think that if this had happened

maybe five out of a hundred might have heard, understood, and acted.

Maybe that spark could have ignited the flame of literacy

with a booking not bound by a rap sheet;

maybe that resolve could have made the difference.

And if only twenty-five out of a thousand

went on to write novels, poems, essays,

went on to degrees of excellence,

went on to show their own children

that freedom is the ability to make choices

and illiteracy is razor-wire atop chain-linked fencing;

and it is not block and bars, not guards and batons which confine,

it is paper, communication, and respect from the word go.

If this had happened,

maybe their commencement would be more

than fifty dollars and a bus ticket back to the city.