Many trips in Rome.

Today first I wrote one poem and finished another, Jesse is making them singable right now, apparently upstate is very dark.
no cemetery tour really here, but still there is a morbid tinge.
First one is not dreary, but nicer and ducks sat with me as I wrote it.
The second one, after a really really horrific story told to me by two historians.

Animals Don’t Tell Stories

The animals don’t tell stories
that are written down in books
their tails are long and detailed
and secured within their skin

State School

Compressed upon my chest
heaviness above
continue layers through
find the bubbling brook

through attic secret floors
found in mortared doors
you never even knew
I am in the wall

Back to today,

to the prison site of what used to be a ’state school’. Ann and Linda from the Historical Society took me. Ann is really amazing, she is 84 years old, has so much energy, wit and interest. People their make jokes about her old boyfriends, Bellamy (a minister who wrote the pledge of allegience and lived in Rome) George Washington (Who was BFF with Lynch who really planned out Rome, or as it was called then, Lynchville, his little empire, but noone really knows how he was over-thrown and Rome became rome) oh and all the other usual suspects. Ann grew up in the depression, she drove us around past house after house she would say, I used to live there, that’s the house my father dies in and Oh that hill we would slide down all the way from there, and a few houses later, ‘we lived in that house’, oh yeah we, slid down that hill, and the hill would be like a mile long!

“That house, they has big parties I would go to, I was 16″. You’d ask if she grew up in Rome and she’d say “I grew up Everywhere!, you name it I lived there”. Turns out that before her father died at 36, she and her family moved 25 times, as each time the rent went up they had to move. Then she went to work in the mills as a mechanic when the men went off to war. She had to carry a screw driver around to defined her self from the guys in charge who would make her do more work for not letting them touch her.

She showed me around the correctional facilities, we got puled over and reprimanded for my video camera, lectured about prison escapes. The prison is on what used to be what was called a “State School” a public facility where people dropped off anyone who was not ‘perfect’ (the say disabled, but it was much more than that), these schools exposed by Geraldo Rivera in the 70’s. Leading to the closing down of such facilities.

Somewhere before this ‘patients’ were given jobs as farmers and domestics in Rome. The farming was used to sustain the inside patients. After the Rivera expose however, assumingly it seemed to appear as slave labor, and first closed down the ’state farms’ , then sometime after the State Schools were closed for horrific and terrible conditions such as finding inmates naked, uncared for and abused, story has it sometimes, even if you just had a lazy eye, or were and orphan you may be sent there, you would end up deranged afterwards. What a terrible feeling I get thinking about it, remembering watching titicut follies when I was in high school. And so the State School closed, and the correctional facilities moved to town. When they were tearing down one of the buildings, they found a sealed wall, behind it were walls with shackles and bones, as people were sealed in.

–Carrie