Random Probation Office Thoughts

This is not a poem. It will feign being a poem. It will feign being real because what I see is unreal.

I submitted an action plan to live. It might very well be denied. Then what?

Z is back after a year-long absence. He was just released from prison. He’s camping under a bridge outside of town. He promises to stay clean and he’s applying for work at the fish processing plant.

A man just got off work from the plant. Graveyard shift. He’s barely awake.

The smell of fish fills the room.

The local seafood industry would collapse without the local criminal justice system producing most of its employees. An interesting relationship. Maybe a novel in there.

A young man fresh out of prison can’t get a job. The willows are beckoning.

Typos on the whiteboard with the instructions for proper behavior.

A man recounts a story of recently having to kill a fawn after it got hit and wounded by a truck in the early morning. He says it triggered some kind of PTSD event that incapacitated him for six hours. His story reminds me of the William Stafford poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” about the motorist who encounters a dead pregnant deer on Highway 6 and rolls it down an embankment. There is a strange narrative history of modern America from Stafford’s poem to the man’s deer story. I don’t know what the narrative is, however. Neither does America.

I should mention that no one wanted to hear the man’s deer story. I didn’t for sure.

Another man, probably 75 years old, says he still can’t get an ID to look for work. Another 75-year old man is taking a $350 polygraph that he can’t afford but goes on his tab. He’s slowly tunneling into the new debtor’s prison in America.

A wave of nausea washes over me.

I sometimes wish I could illustrate what unfolds here, instead of writing about it, but I can’t draw. I like the idea of a graphic novel about probation life.

A Tibetan proverb goes: When you meet your greatest enemy, you will find your greatest strength.

Back in the car, I grip the steering wheel and notice my hands are shaking.