Congress should declare a National Fart Day to relieve everyone. A musing.

— Lester L. Polk

Of all the simple pleasures in life, nothing compares with a good fart. Although they can indeed be unpleasant to those standing in their immediate vicinity, farts honestly bring great relief to those who release them.

It is considered unmannerly to expel wind in the presence of others, but this pressing intestinal need inevitably seems to arise at the most inopportune times when one is surrounded by people. First dates, elevators, classrooms, church — flatulence knows no timetable.

How many times have you suffered abdominal cramping for the comfort of others? Silently bore rectal rumbling so that sensibilities will not be offended and your reputation remains upstanding? Too many, I say.

We need a change so cheese-cutting men and women can break wind, poot, and float an air biscuit like free Americans.

Considering there’s a national day for everything from doughnuts to donkeys, Congress ought to enact a National Fart Day as a holiday from the restraints of good manners governing the breaking of wind.

On National Fart Day all citizens would be encouraged to let loose their anal acoustics everywhere and anytime. Just think of the relief it would bring to one and all! I say, let freedom rip! It’s about time.

Being forgiven leads to forgiving others in a cycle of compassion that has the power to break the chains of violence.

— by Lester L. Polk

When I first arrived in prison, I somehow kept expecting that an alarm would go off and awaken me from this surreal nightmare, that I’d be able to tell my fiancee Vicki that I had had a horrible dream where I was taken away from her and locked in a cage.

Yet day after day, I woke up and saw not the pewter eyes of my teenage love, but the drab painted walls of the cell that became my expatriate dwelling for what would be the remainder of my life.

As time passed, I found myself in a quandary: should I become one of those around me — a convict who accepted this environment as his life and choose its mores over society’s? Or should I attempt to retain the Lester that I was before the infamous ride of a night that left a man dead and his wife and daughter brutalized?

I chose the latter. So with the typical care of a fish out of water, I stayed close to the wall and tried not to make a fool of myself as I frantically held on to what humanity I still had with a vise-like grip.

Yet, no matter how hard I tried, I came to the conclusion that for a man bearing the weight of a life sentence, holding on to the vestiges of his existence in the free world is like trying to catch the wind.

After the first decade or so of incarceration, I thought like a convict. I’d get a 32-cent an hour job and a girlfriend to send me care packages and maybe sneak in a cuddle or two during visits. Still, I was focused enough to steer clear of the common prison fare of gangs, drugs, violence and anarchy, mostly because I had had a few encounters with violence. Each had proved more destructive than the slow death sentence I was already subjected to.

Yet, I could not see taking my last breath behind bars. After taking the obligatory trip to the law library and jailhouse lawyers beat me out of my money, I realized that it would take a miracle to get out from under life without parole.

So I tried a tactic born of desperation — I prayed. I had been brought up in the church and I remembered one verse from Sunday school — “And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” John 8:32. I figured that if I prayed enough and was good enough, I’d find this truth and it would set me free.

I leaned into it hard because I wanted Jesus’s help — bad. I went about it like a college course, treating the Bible as required reading and worship services as required classes. My conduct began to change. I became a good Christian man, a soldier for Jesus. Yet, I still wasn’t whole. I didn’t experience the cleansing power that preachers talked about so often. I still felt hollow.

Then one day, I had an epiphany. In order to go forward, I had to go backward, back to the night where I lost my moral compass and sense of decency. But I couldn’t do it. I had worked hard to get rid of that Lester. He was a monstrosity who had emerged only once in my lifetime, but he had ruined lives. I no longer knew him and I certainly didn’t want to revisit him.

Like a secret agent, I had always had a cover story — I had gone along for a robbery and it went horribly wrong, I was just “an accessory to an accidental homicide.” But that was only half the truth. While I had no criminal background, I was not just an accessory in the course of events. I was an anger-propelled catalyst of them.

I was fueled by the rage of perceived injustice against me, a rage that I had been holding inside for years. That fateful night, I was in a position of total control over others, and I lost grip of reality, compassion and goodness. Even as I write these words, it is still hard for me to speak frankly about what I did. I was a black man fulfilling an old stereotype, robbing a white family in their home, yelling racial epithets with an ungodly blood lust that had been building like a volcano for years.

For forty-eight minutes, I terrorized the family whose home I invaded. It only ended when I threatened the sanctity of the teenage daughter, and the father heroically intervened by attacking me. My co-defendant wrestled him down and shot him in the back. We fled.

A short reflection on maturity.
— By Lester L. Polk

“The older I get, the smarter my mother becomes,” was an adage repeatedly declared by my fourth-grade teacher. The saying made no sense to the ten-year-old me, but now I find it overflowing with much wisdom.

When we’re young, our journey consists of just going along without making preparations, asking for instructions or seeking directions. No wonder we end up lost.

But wisdom can be found in our mistakes. By getting lost and finding our own way back, we gain experience. Once we gain that, we are able to acquire the maturity that will guide us in our various journeys from that point on.

Being lost, of course, is not nearly as much fun as getting where we want to go, just as telling someone off is not as effective as proper communication, or quitting a job is not as gratifying as paying rent, or realizing that sex has consequences far beyond climax. When we get tired of being lost, maturity informs us that we are not indestructible so we better take it easy.

In my youth, I lacked the wisdom, experience and maturity to guide me in my journey, but I’m hearing my mother’s voice more and more lately.

This time I think I’ll listen.

When I was about ten years old, I was sexually abused by an older boy. I thought I had brought it upon myself because I didn’t fight back. My family, my source of safety and values, told me so. From that moment on, life was no longer simple, no longer clean and innocent.

I saw my life through a prism of paralyzing shame. My entire purpose for being was filtered through what I had suffered, and there was no escape from it. The incident was my constant, unwanted companion, my scarlet letter branded on my soul. I felt my life could never again be whole.

As I grew into adolescence, I began to question my very essence, who I was on the inside and my God-given heterosexual orientation.That disjointed thinking of a victim formed the nexus of my teenage behavior because I had to find a way of erasing the stain off me. I needed the feelings of powerlessness that overcame me during that incident and never left, to end. I had to get my being back from that animal. I thought I could do that by becoming a “real man.”

I turned into a hypersexed person. Since it was my greatest fear that people would out about my secret, I made myself the least likely candidate, the person no one would ever suspect of having undergone such a trauma. But no matter how much porn I viewed or how many sex partners I collected, the confusion and shame remained in my psyche.

My consciousness was so contaminated that the shadow of my trauma spilled into all my relationships, both familial and romantic. I would shrivel on the inside when I met new people for fear that they would find out about my dirty secret and reject me. Anytime I came into contact with these new friends, it was like I was constantly reliving the worst moment of my life, as if I were stuck in a horrible time loop of that night, desperately trying to get free but to no avail.

I have since learned that in molestation cases, it’s not the actual act that is the worst for the victim, it’s the constant state of shame and filthiness that the act leaves on the victim. It’s the fear that if people knew, they would run away in terror. It’s the inner alarm that screams “you’re not good enough!”, “no one will ever love you!” But these are the insidious lies the trauma wants you to believe because by believing them, the trauma remains in power.

After many years, I finally came to the conclusion that life is not what happens to you, but how you react to what happens. I was giving that predator too much strength. I was allowing him to live rent-free in my life. He was only my master because I let him. If I chose not to let him rule, then he is a deposed ruler. I alone had the power to change “my” trauma into “the” trauma. I can know that what happened is just what happened. It is just one thing in my life, and is not the seed from which the rest of my life grows.

I know now that what that he did was his issue, not mine. I didn’t turn gay because my ten-year-old self went into shock at the hands of a predator. I can’t blame my family because they did not know how to handle the unspeakable, a tragedy that was easier to sweep under the rug than confront by getting me the counseling that I desperately needed.

I can only say this: I no longer accept “my” trauma. It is now just “my life,” one of the many elements that added all together, make me, me. So as detestable as that incident was, I wouldn’t be the man that I am without it. I accept it as part of my life, knowing that I am the only one who can control it, not a bewildered ten-year-old boy and surely not fourteen-year-old predator.