In “The Uses of the Blues,” James Baldwin says, “In ever generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.” Baldwin is eerily still right, all these years later.

Last night I was on an airplane, having spent three days in Florida, invited by the Florida Department of Corrections to talk to around 850 young guys at three prisons. I didn’t tell them all I should have – I wanted to tell them that they’ve learned something that takes people their whole lives to come to grips with. They’ve figured out that to be in the world is to suffer, and maybe worse, they’ve placed themselves (often placed themselves, sometimes been placed there by circumstance) in situations where they have to wake up every morning knowing that they’ve made someone else suffer. Made victims suffer, made relatives suffer, made mother’s suffer. I stood before a group of over 85,90 young men, all aged 14-18, all with felonies, and wondered how the world went horribly wrong for them. I stood before them in my gray suit, the legacy I inherited from Dr. Corrie Gaines, the professor who told me that you always wear a sharp gray suit. I stood before them still knowing my state number by heart, still able to recite it on command. I was invited, ostensibly, to motivate them into a better life. The problem was that I’ve learned there is no real words to motivate a man to understand that suffering isn’t an equivalent to ruin, that causing suffering isn’t an equivalent to being forever ruined.

The faces before me where skeptical. Maybe this is why I was invited. Who better to fight off skepticism than the kid who once dressed in state blues, or state greens, or state burgandies just like them; but who now, finds himself shaking hands with the Warden, eating lunch with the Warden, being praised by the very men that once told me to stand for count. I never met an Horatio Alger though – and the truth, the bitter truth, is that all I had to offer was anecdote and lines stolen from the mouths of other men.

Oh, I told them about tenacity – but who among them doesn’t understand the tenacity it takes to wake up morning after morning knowing the barbed wire that curls around fences like a door forever slamming in their faces? The main gift I offered was being invited, was walking to the microphone with my beard sprouting grays and my hair having not seen a comb in forever. But is that ever enough? Is it ever enough to meet a man who walks in the world knowing he’s suffered by still smiling, knowing he’s caused pain but found a way not to be that pain.

I told these young men about my nightmares, I told them about Howard University not honoring the scholarship my academic performance had earned. I repeated what the judge told me, told them that the world, or more precisely the United States is willing to build as many prisons as needed to hold them – but what of this is news? It’s all suffering and knowing you’ll suffer. Yet, at the end of the day, this kid walked up to me and asked why I’d done it. At the start of the next talk, or the middle of it, a kid asked the same thing, why I’d done it. This is what they wanted to know, and in wanting to know, they are just like the parents I talk to, just like the lawyers, just like my friends. But, if there were an answer to that, an answer that exists outside of the realm of – I just wasn’t wise or old, or hesitant enough to care about the suffering I’d cause – than there would be no need for an answer. See, what I was trying to say is that prison makes you afraid of yourself. Makes you start asking the questions that only arise when you’ve heard someone bad enough to notice. And see, most times, in the free world, if you hurt someone bad enough, there is always a way to drown that memory of hurt. There is work, there is liquor, there are all manner of elicit drugs. But once you’ve worked your way into hurting someone enough to end up in prison – and it’s not even about the particular crime that might land you there, no it’s about how those cells nudge you into remember the first time you made your mother cry, your father, your woman – once you’ve hurt someone enough to end up in prison, every day is a memory of hurt. Hard to deal with that kind of pain and move beyond the monster you imagine yourself to be. That’s why there is violence in prison. As if the violence can make you more of who you already know you are – cause while you recognize suffering, you’re still not too sure on the fact that everyone suffers, that people move beyond pain and causing pain.

Someone told me that my past is behind me, that I should let it rest there. That I shouldn’t let others keep defining me, or mentioning in their way of defining me the night I put a pistol to a man’s head and drove away with his car. What I did tell that group of young men is that my felony drives most of what I do. The past is too vibrant to forget. And why forget? Why believe that by not bringing it up it’s no longer true. I said to them, quoting Baldwin, “How have we managed to become what we have, in fact, become? And if we are, as indeed we seem to be, so empty and so desperate, what are we to do about it? How shall we put ourselves in touch with reality?”

When asked if I was a problem child – I hesitated, and realized that I’d been lying about my own childhood for years. That I’d been lost, even after prison, in the idea that you can’t be two things at once. So I ignored the marijuana smoke that filtered in and out of my lungs daily for two years before I found a prison cell. I ignored the times I got suspended, the arguments with my mother. I ignored the fights, the violence I learned to ignore. And I told people that prison was the last place I expected to find myself. I laughed a little at the question – was I a problem child? Then I said I was. Said that prison made me confront who I was in a way that nothing else had. And despite my belief that the sentence was rough, that my survival was never suppose to happen – I can’t deny the gift that a cell gave me. The ability to stare at all my flaws and try to be more than them.

The state of Florida has some of the worst juvenile justice practices in the country, children as young as 14 have been given life in prison without the possibility of parole. So many young people, juveniles, have been tried as adults that there are at least three facilities only for them. Yet, the Director of Education in Florida has to been one of the hardest working cats that is employed within the penal system. And likely, there are other men like him. The wardens I met seemed to want a kid not to come back to prison. It’s something of a miracle that for a moment I was employed by the Florida Department of Corrections – asked to speak despite my stints in solitary confinement, despite my book being on their disapproved publication list.

Before I left, walked away from the last prison I visited, exhausted and ready, so ready to smoke a Newport, I talked to this kid. He’d been to college for a semester, a year before ending up in prison. He’d learned the vocabulary of a jail cell – he told me he’d given back time. But you can’t give back time. I looked at him and hoped he knew he’d given that cell time he can’t get back. Hoped he was gonna run as fast as he could away from prison the moment released.

All I got is a story. I write it down again and again in different ways. I stand before audiences and tell the story. What else is there. The miracle, if there ever is a miracle, is that the story has always been heard before. The miracle is that with nothing new, for any of us to say, we still find knew ways to understand the blues, to fashion a life that looks different from the ways we suffered.

Poetry readings are often boring occasions.  And then there are times they aren’t, there are times when the words are vibrant and the readers are as electric in person as they appear on the page.  I can’t speak of myself, but last Thursday I read at University of New Haven and know that Roger Bonair Agard gave an absolutely electric reading.  The thing about reading with someone who you know is a good poet is that you expect, from the very beginning, to bring your A game. You expect to bring something more than just a monotone recitation of what you’ve written.

For the record – Roger is a poet whose birthright offers him gifts than many English speaking poets aren’t aware that they have.  As a Trinidadian he is blessed with a lilt in his voice that is suited to verse – and look, that’s stereotypical, but Kwame Dawes once told me that he knows he can read the newspaper and sound entertaining. Yet, in “Atonement” Roger says that his friend calls him kinetic, and truly, reading publicly he is. I talk about “Atonement” because, as narrative, it is exemplary of what poetry does to make it poetry and not prose.  Moreover, as poetry not mediated by line length, it demonstrates how to make a poem work within the confines of what narrative offers us when created with the range of figurative tools that Roger uses.

But truly, a poet talks about a reading in a different way than we expect readers to discuss readings. We want readers moved by the words, we want them thinking about the contradictions of the world we bring to bear. I listened to Roger both as a poet and as a reader. As a poet I was challenged to internalize my own words so that I could give them to the world from a cavern within me, from whatever is beating inside me when I face the world. I don’t know though, I think we do a disservice when we fail to realize how complicated the job of a poet is – to make that connection with the audience, to believe that the words should live inside the lives of people who walk in breathe in the world too.

I recorded the reading, just so that I can go back to it later. You perform with someone that is good and you begin to understand what you can do when you have a modicum of control over the words you use. Roger’s like that. Here is him performing “Atonement” in Seattle:

James Baldwin’s uncollected writings have just been published in a collection edited by Randall Kenan called The Cross of Redemption. A few days ago, a friend of mine told me to read a little Baldwin each day to remind myself what it means to be an American. Baldwin was a bad man. America gave him the platform to make the long essay art, and to make going back again and again to discuss race a well that never ran dry. But probably, if all Baldwin gave us was talk of race, we wouldn’t still be reading him today. Baldwin’s essay are art, because race conversation is a gateway to discussing what it means to be human, at a particular time, in a particular place – and that knowledge says something about what it means to be human at any time, in any place.

One of these essays, the first I read from the book, makes the book worth it. “The Uses of the Blues” sticks to your ribs. Baldwin writes, “Guilt is a very peculiar emotion. As long as you are guilty about something, no matter what it is, you are not compelled to change it. Guilt is like a warm bath, or, to be rude, it is like masturbation: you can get used to it, you can prefer it, you may get to a place where you cannot live without it, because in order to live without it, in order to get past this guilt, you must act. And in order to act, you must be conscious and take great chances and be responsible for consequences.” That says everything about not moving forward. It says everything about why there is still crime in the city and the graduation rates shame us all. We have become quite comfortable in our guilt or we have chosen not to care – either way there is no movement. Baldwin’s gift is that he can talk race and bring a person to something in the world today. That’s always what I get.

It makes me wonder if Baldwin were writing today would he have a blog. The essays of his that I read again and again all have a measured intelligence that one just assumes comes from writing and rewriting and thinking. Blogging doesn’t allow for that, at least now when I blog, but maybe I’m able to think a little quicker, for myself, and think my way through what will become longer pieces. The question though, I guess, is if that thinking is for the public. It’s almost like writers today publish their journals as they’re being written. I like that, and I fear that. And still I write here, and hope to write here more.

You wake up one morning and decide that you want to be something – it’s not a doctor, not a lawyer. Something more mundane – something that you think makes you halfway cool. You’ve just read Neon Vernacular by Yusef Komunyakaa – or you’ve watched a video clip of Patricia Smith reading. Or maybe you really are me and someone has slid a poetry anthology under your cell door. You read that little anthology and then decide that poetry is a life, a vocation. Then you wake up and realize that the rode to poverty is paved one stanza at a time, or the road to irrelevancy.

Your family looks at you – what is it you do exactly? All of a sudden you know you aren’t in the life you planned for yourself. I mean, poetry was supposed to lead to riches. It was supposed to lead to adoring fans. Instead, it has made you pay far too much attention to the world, to your flaws, to the beauty of a butterfly on your windowsill.

I’m not sure if any of that is true. The whole thing about irrelevancy. I have about a dozen poetry books on the sofa beside me. Anthologies, little books. I have a book by Joyce A Joyce that is a collection of interviews with Sonia Sanchez. I have Dante Micheaux’s new book, Amorous Shepherd. I have the Norton Anthology of Poetry, Terrence Hayes Lighthead – and I have this belief that the words mean something. That they have gotten me through some days that nothing else would have gotten me through. I have a book by Rilke talking about Cezanne. Most lessons in life I guess you can learn anywhere – but maybe there is an inescapable beauty in learning something from a book of poems.

A few weeks ago I had an op-ed appear in the Washington Post. In many ways it’s one of the pieces I’m most proud of that’s been printed. Excruciating to write, I like to think it was me stepping more fully into the foray. More fully trying to publish an essay that moves away from my own life and story and into what I feel, have felt, about things I’ve seen. Also, the whole thing was pretty hard for me to see, deal with, be a part of – and I’ve long thought art was/is a response to life; but, I’ve rarely (since being released from prison) been able to use art, to use literature, to try to say something about the unexplainable. Anyway, here is the link and the piece will follow:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/22/AR2010052203045.html

Fifty years ago, James Baldwin published a letter to his nephew in which he wrote: “You were born where you were born, and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.” Baldwin could just as easily have been writing about Southeast D.C. in 2010, even with President Obama in the White House, a Metro ride away.

How else to explain statistics like this one: In a city that has grown more racially diverse, more than 90 percent of the young people under Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services (DYRS) supervision are black. How else to explain the low graduation rates? How else to explain the violence, at once so senseless and so expected?

Two weeks ago, the D.C. Humanities Council and Provisions Library sponsored a discussion of Ernest J. Gaines’s searing novel “A Lesson Before Dying,” the book chosen for the citywide “Big Read” program. I was part of a panel that arrived at the event expecting to discuss how Gaines’s work could offer insights to those who are part of the lives of the more than 900 young people in the DYRS system.

I first read “A Lesson Before Dying” as a 16-year-old locked up for carjacking in a Virginia jail. It was the first book I ever read cover to cover, and the questions it raises have haunted me ever since. The cells I was confined to were a long way from the death row of Gaines’s story, but they were just as much a place where black boys went to be forgotten. I wanted to suggest to the disparate group of advocates, family members, young people and passersby that in Gaines’s character Grant, we have a blueprint for how to care.

What I didn’t realize is how difficult it is to discuss a book when a cloud of death fills the air. In the audience was a father who had lost his teenage son and a mother who had lost her teenage daughter in the March 30 drive-by shooting in Southeast. I don’t pretend to know what to say in the face of such tragedy.

The discussion of the book broke down into a public meeting about DYRS policies, and from there it turned into a scream. No one could manage a word to make death make sense. There were shouts and chaos, grief and anger. One man had to be restrained. The mother rushed to the stage and slammed a photo of her murdered daughter in front of the four of us there. I wondered what it did to her to have to carry around the death of her child every day, in her head and in her heart, in the photos that spilled from her purse.

I wanted to look away from the photo, but I realized why it was there. In 1955, after 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped and brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi, Mamie Till Mobley had her son’s casket left open at his memorial service. She did this not just to remind the murderers what they had done; it was to remind the world, to remind a growing, interlocked network of communities, activists and political leaders what the turmoil of segregation and violence had wrought.

This time, the image of a murdered child was not about the same kind of racism; it was about black folks shooting down black children in the street for no reason. But James Baldwin could draw the line. “You were born where you were born, and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.” Fifteen years ago, I grew up in this area, and the most important thing for me to be was hard. I went to prison, and for many of us young black men there, behind chain-link fences and barbed wire, the most important thing was to be hard, to hold our own.

I admit today that I am not hard. I admit that I cried for two days thinking of the photo of this young girl. And still, I know my tears, these words, ultimately are a drop in the bucket — that they don’t approach the pain that this girl’s mother must carry.

Worse, I know that the pain, the tears and the screams in the small meeting room don’t approach the herculean effort needed to change this tide of senseless violence — and I fear history and our children’s children will judge us harshly if we fail to find a way.

A few days ago I had the pleasure of recording a commentary for NPR, Juveniles Need a Chance, Not Life in Prison. Some of the response to this piece was visceral, and it reminds me why discussing juvenile justice and criminal reform issues are so difficult. I admit, as someone who has spent some time in prison, much of what I say reflects a desire to see less crime and to see our systems of dealing with people who have made criminal mistakes, particularly young people, changed. But that’s not to say that I don’t recognize the heinous nature of some crimes, and the huge impact a crime that may not be rape or murder may very well have on the victims. My advocacy position is situated by my experience with the justice system. It’s as simple as that. It’s based on my belief that a just system has to allow the possible that people can change, especially if we’re going to reduce this to only non homicide offenses. This isn’t even about how overwhelmingly discriminatory the meting out of these sentences has been, nor is it about the United States being the only industrialized nation sending juveniles to prison for life for non homicide offenses. It’s about the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Graham v Florida. Graham had been placed on probation for an armed burglary committed at 16, and then had his probation revoked after allegedly committing several other armed robberies – the Judge in his case revoked his probation and sentenced him to life in prison (the prosecutor asked for between 10-15 years, I believe). In their ruling the SCOTUS declared juvenile life without parole for non homicide offenses a violation of the 8th amendments cruel and unusual punishment clause and therefore unconstitutional. Essentially, the court said that a Judge cannot deem a juvenile incorrigible and beyond redemption in a non homicide case.

My NPR piece is a glimpse of my take on the situation. A right to review doesn’t guarantee release. I respect the anguish of victims and was not then, nor never am, out to make light of the impact of any crime on a person, a family. a community. I don’t think there are many people who’ve lived in or around Washington DC, that doesn’t know someone who has been a victim of a series crime. That’s why this subject is so difficult. It’s not safe. It’s about how to deal with young people who have hurt others.

I’m asked all the time if I’ve spoken to my victim since my release. I haven’t. Not because I’m not interested, but because I don’t feel I have the right to initiate that conversation. I know that my ignorance and callousness may haunt this man’s nights – and nothing I’ve done since I’ve been released will change that. If his pain is the measure of if I should ever have the chance to be released, I lose every time. I wrote about Rashid because even though our crimes were very different our sentences could have been the same. It’s a humbling thing to have almost ruined your life in 30 minutes. It has made me grateful for second chances.