His eyes opened. His nose smells. His right hand reaches out and runs along the cell wall. He feels pain in his lower back. He breathes in the years and exhales within his mind. He begins to pull, push, struggle himself upright on the prison bunk. He lifts one leg, then the other and his feet succumb slowly to the cold concrete floor. With his torso lean; his stooped shoulders, he stares at all below. He sees the draft blowing across the bottom of the steel door; pushing, lent, bits and pieces of this and that. With a moan he stands and shuffles the long, the short, distance to the steel sink. His hurt hands grab hold the sides and ever so slowly he looks, believes, into the tin mirror. Oh, what he sees. The age; as if the bent tree outside the cell’s window….. In time with worn old but clean prison clothes, he begins the journey. First he eases his head out the cell door. He looks left. He looks right. He begins to move. There’s no one about….. Finally, he enters the traffic of the living dead; the long red broad way of the prison hall. He does not look up at the faces. His mind ignores the sound. The smell of prison food his lungs reject….. Yet, he shuffles on.
He moves with the set purpose within. He moves with the final judgment he has decided within. In time he’s there. It is where the orders come from. It is where they told him he must leave. He must go free after 52 years caged. He stands, backs up against the stone of the wall. Now he adjusts his stare, a moving stare, at what is about him; the waste, the human waste, as he. Then the plan begins to develop. It is a simple plan as he himself; a simple prisoner and no more. He exhales. He sees a cut in the human traffic and he shuffles across to the spot he chose. Before the set of steel bars he locks onto with his old hands. Then with all the aches within, he begins to slide to that red stone floor…..
He shimmies his arms through the steel and holds on for dear life….. “Come on Mr. Brown. You’ve got to go today,” delivers a guard from the group of guards around the desperate soul….. They see his head shake, the gray of it. They hear the mumble and whimper coming from he who sits….. “Clear the hall. Clear the hall!” And the prisoners are chased away; just the man and his want and the uniforms with their orders….”I, I, there ain’t nothin out there for me.” And finally a clear sentence comes from what the courts have delivered from decades within the prison castle….. “Just leave him be”; “Come on all of you go on about your jobs” said the warden, leaving the man to decide when to unlock his soul from the forever grip.
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What I have just revealed to you I have witnessed; for I was one of those prisoners in that hall traffic that day. What I have relayed to you is occurring in prisons all across America. We are the only country that keeps non-violent prisoners forevermore in cages. Sad to say; I George Martorano, might someday find his set of bars and lock onto with all of my soul’s wants.
George Martorano, CR: 12973 George is serving life for cannabis. You can read more about George HERE
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