A poem submitted to Free Verse by Horace Thomas at Salinas Valley State Prison, Soledad, CA 93960. You can find recordings of Thomas reading his work aloud through Prison Radio: https://www.prisonradio.org/media/audio/horace-thomas.
A light is going off in my head
warning circuit overload
I can’t stay here 24/7
or my mind will explode…
I drift away from the prison
on a fairly regular basis
using my imagination
an abstract oasis…
Prison suits some people.
Hard core women and men
here inside these walls
is where their life begins…
“Hotel California”
An Eagles classic song
but this is not my destiny,
fate got it all wrong…
I sit here and often wonder,
my thoughts blowing in the wind,
“this is just a setback,
surely not the end!”
I have a sense of humor
but I am also dead serious
prison life is a cancer:
incurable, mysterious!
A percentage of the guys
have started to slip.
Loose their hold on life,
each step is a trip…
The games the guards play
you try to do your best
turning your mind to other things
an attempt to avoid the stress…
There are inmates
who manipulate the pig
they take turns
and treat it as a gig…
It’s a two-way street though
the pigs take it a step further—
manipulating the inmates,
playing them against each other!
Through all the madness
the bump and grind,
the hardships of prison life,
doing time…
The first the that goes
is the minds of the men.
It’s another aspect
of life in the pen…
Crime and punishment,
the war on drugs,
locking up the gang members
and neighborhood thugs…
There’s no getting around it
the ramifications of doing time
in one way or another
it affects the mind…
Criminals oil this machine,
tighten its nuts and bolts
anytime they come to prison
to serve out a jolt…
Some prisoner’s lose touch
from the fiction and the real.
Turning around in circles
strapped to a spinning wheel.
Everybody’s human,
this includes the guards,
they’re always gambling
against the fate in the cards…
Just like the criminals
they know crime doesn’t pay
some people just get lucky
and never serve a day…
Anyway you look at it
this is not life at all.
It’s the most terrifying,
intense wake up call!