Audio Tour through Eastern State Penn

Steve Buscemi, does his voice sound like: prison|| servitude/rehabilitation—nothin’ but blue skies in this panopticon cloistered/city/streets daily wares listen to hawks/crow the car/horn/child; but smelling life is altogether something earned as they strip you of one angle at a time:your/time||

Late 1600s Quaker leader, William Penn and the Great Experiment in time became the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. His vision was for prison to be a place of rehabilitation where freedom was earned. Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Rush, & Bishop William White’s unblemished sky isolation treatments—there must be a mode of Penitence found embedded; a child inside yearning to be free and so The Pennsylvania System revolutionized daily

suffering, crimes before brought corporal punishment daily flogging by the rod, maiming appendages, sincerest of time in the stocks and pillory, blinding, branding, death any child could witness, now was sequestered in Penitentiaries: prisms of reform, an inmate’s golden ticket to witness their own sky unencumbered by all distraction: alone: a cure-all earnestness

for autobaptism to earn freedom through daily meditation with skylights and the silence of time you create your own prison be born again God’s child

The halls were soft like butter arches like salvation rays of silent nights convent children mice guards with wool feet shuffling prayers like a deck of cards to suppress the yearnings through deadeye skylights beg a guard to speak one hand in the feeding hole I am prison a sacked head resisting temptation reading like a chant again So teach us to number our days back then it was two years maybe eight there was no death row at first there was no life time sentence so be glad in it be glad in it the rain is falling in your thirty minutes of breaking sky

The cells made of concrete featured a single glass sky, the eye of god.¹ We had youngsters here too.² This was hard time.³ We played chess, I taught this one guard.⁴ I hold this slow and daily tempering of the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse…⁵ confined to a dark cell on bread and water for disorderly conduct, shouting, and disturbing the other prisoners⁶

the sky times out for prison children broken minutes, earned daily