To the Convicted

A prose poem to Brock Turner. I imagine you’re thinking today about time. About the six months ahead of you and how you’ll fill them. One hundred and eighty-three days. Upwards of four thousand hours. Two hundred and sixty-three thousand minutes–and some change. I have some thoughts about what you could do with all that time. You could take some correspondence courses. But … then again … six months is not enough time for you to complete your bachelor’s. Or even your associate’s. You might choose instead to self-educate. Pick up, say, the Holy Bible. But … even if you read and reflect on one hundred and fifty verses every day, you will not have finished the book in six months. Same is true of the works of Shakespeare. Even reading one act of a play every day, you’d still have one play left over after six months. Maybe something a little more modern? Listen to one Beatles song a day … but you’ll only cover about half of their oeuvre. Watch a Criterion Collection film a day … and you’ll get about a quarter of the way through the list. It’s too bad there just won’t be enough time. But you know what? I’ll tell you what you could do in six months’ time. You could turn a woman’s life inside out. Heck. You could do that in twenty minutes of action.