I sat next to a woman in the lobby of the probation office. She was talking to a friend and the subject was her current boyfriend. Things were a little rocky for a few weeks, but had finally smoothed over after some heart to hearts. They had a unique history together. The boyfriend had slept with her two sisters and her daughter but she could see past all of that. It reminded me of a scene from a novel that’s never been written, nor remotely conceived because no other American writer has ever seen or heard what I have in these meetings.<\/p>\n
The meetings are over and with this ending comes the end of my probation poems or whatever they were. Walt Whitman just took over and I let him guide me. I never tried to make the writing conform to any known genre. I became a poet during these moments, really for the first time, and produced poems that I know poetry journals will never publish because they wouldn’t consider them poems. That’s why they are poems. <\/p>\n
We shall see if they ever see the light of publishing day outside of this blog. I wrote them to make sense of insanity and to fend off the cannibalization of my being.<\/p>\n
We all shook hands and then I drove away for the last time, but I believe my mind will linger here forever. I developed a new, deeper empathy for people during my time in probation. I saw the debasement and destruction of basically decent people. I helped every way I could, from handing out clothes, toiletries, books, gift certificates and clarification of laws and processes. I was transformed into the person and writer I always wanted to become, but never conceived could possibly exist. <\/p>\n
I plan to use what I have learned to serve in new ways. <\/p>\n
Onward to the future.<\/p>\n\n
I sat next to a woman in the lobby of the probation office. She was talking to a friend and the subject was her current boyfriend. Things were a little rocky for a few weeks, but had finally smoothed over after some heart to hearts. They had a unique history together. The boyfriend had slept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4758,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,5],"tags":[20,6,253,364],"class_list":["post-4757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-astoria","category-meditations","tag-astoria","tag-matt-love","tag-probation","tag-probation-poem","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4757"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4759,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4757\/revisions\/4759"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}