A man can't live without freedom. No point bein' alive without it. I can't find me no freedom in this world. All I got left is willing myself to death. Freedom ain't when you got nothin' left to lose, it's only when you got something to live for you got freedom. How does someone live for iron?
The nightmare trial keeps playing in my head like a movie you already seen but keep hopin' the ending will change. It's got to change or nothin' means nothin'. It started with that judge eyeing me like I stole her lunch money. I knew about her already, the Slut of San Antonio. They say she won't say no to no man no time. You know what a woman like that is doin' to herself? She's raping herself.
So guess what happens when a man goes up before her accused of rapin'? She gotta prove how much she hate rapin' or they gonna take away her robe, her car and her fancy downtown condo. She thinks she can fool God by foolin' herself. The paper said I was on trial but truth was she was on trial and was guilty, guilty, guilty! I got handed down the maximum sentence for her crime. They said that was because she loves justice so much.
Minute I got my conviction all the guilty feeling, unconvicted rapists come runnin' out of the dark. They got this vexed look on their face tellin' me courts never make a mistake, godly jury of my peers, wish they'd hang me like in the old days. They spittin' on me 'cause their mothers can't love them. I can still see their angry faces popping out of the shadows, somehow thinking I can save them. If I hadn't been in chains I'd of stepped on them miserable little worms good and save the world.
"The courts are never wrong I tell you!"
Boy, that district attorney sure hated my guts. He was talking about me like he knew me his whole life. Where does he get off talking with that kind of authority? How is he so sure he got the truth inside him? It was like watching a man get drunk, more he drink louder he gets. Don't he ever think about what it mean if he be wrong? I never in my life wanted to kill a man so bad as that! That man is like a knife in the world, cuttin' lives to pieces, making it so we can't live together. Funny part is, that exactly what he said about me.
Yeah maybe I hit my sister a few times when I was young but I never done nothin' to no woman no matter what that lady on the stand says. It just ain't in me. But listenin' to that attorney talk about me, saying I'm vile and vicious like he's speaking God's own truth. He said it so hard he got me believin' it. Got me thinking back to my Sheila, how I hurt her when I ran away from her love. I was angry then and I don't know why but I pulled up our flower of love to die. I'm feeling that same angry all over again in the courtroom.
That attorney man got me feeling so guilty I couldn't fight back. Would Sheila stand with him or with me right now? Would she say I should be sent down the river? Part of me just can't fight what she'd say. I always wanted to be somebody but I ended up a bum. Maybe if I'd married Sheila this hell wouldn't be happening to me. You just wouldn't believe the kind of thoughts go runnin' through your head when your life is on trial by eyeless strangers.
And so I got slammed into the belly of the iron beast, buried alive, buried alive. My reward for bein' dragged over the burning coals of the court was to be thrown right into the fire. I must live now the worst fate of all, to have seen the true heart of my fellow man. No one should have to live with such a knowing. No child should ever suffer to be raised by them. There's no God in these iron bars, to who do I appeal?
At night I go out my mind. I grab the iron posts of my bed holdin' on for dear life, like I'm gonna fall off a cliff if I let go. I never make it even two hours sleep before I scream myself awake, always with my hair dripping wet and my jaw sore from the clenching. Waking from the sleeping nightmare to the waking nightmare don't make for much relief. It's like that when you live in a world where your words don't count.
Ya know what gets ya most the most? The stillness. It's heavy and solid, like you can carve it into blocks and stack it. It's got a real high pitch whine to it, it never varies or gets louder or softer or higher or lower. Just always the same, like the universe is dead and you're the last living object in it.
I got me a small clip on reading light. Sometimes I turn it on then back away to the corner of my cell where it still dark. I look into the light to see if anything gonna happen. I wait and watch, glad I'm not the one in the spotlight now. Bad things happen when you in the spotlight. People think they can do anything to you.
If I could be like a free man, I'd take this stillness and bottle it up. Then I'd take a bottle of it and throw it inside that San Antonio slut's home. Like I said, it's heavy so it'll run along the floor so when she gets up her feet will get stuck in it and she can't move. She can yell and scream all she wants but it won't make no difference. She gonna find it takes two to break a stillness and there ain't no way around that now or ever. Feel your own fate, bitch.
I can see why them guards are in prison, they deserves to be here. They's animals because they think they ain't. One of the new guys was laughed at by one of them animals when he tried to tell them he'd been raped by a prisoner known to do that. But I knew this guard to be a church man, taking his family every week. So I quotes him what Jesus says, "What you do unto the least of you, you do unto me." But then his eyes turned narrow and red and he punches me in the stomach. "You're not Jesus!" he says walking away. I'm thinking, "And you're no Christian!"
I hears another animal on the radio saying I live in a country club. You ever hear of a country club in Texas without a goddam air conditioner? Bet that son-of-a-bitch couldn't make it a day much less a summer without it like we do. Most we can have is a fan and of course ya gotta buy it to even get it. But there's these folks who will give you one if you can't get one on your own. They don't ask if you guilty or innocent. I cried when I got mine.
So I think I'm gonna stop eating. I'll make it look like I am but I'll just get weaker and weaker and finally get the hell out of here. God don't like it God can do somethin' about it. A lady of the light wrote me once, to be my penpal. She made me breathe again, made it so I wanted to live. She said such wonderful words to me I saved every one. But my feelings got so deep I knew as long as we friends there'd be no way I could kill myself. She can't get me out of here either so I was mean to her to run her off, so I could have hope. Been hearin' that attorney yellin' in me head ever since.
I'm going mad inside this iron tomb. What's the point of all this hell? To die alone, a life unexamined? The truth dies with me, never meaning nothin'. I hope God will love me more in the next world. Seems somethin' happened here beyond my understanding. My mind is blank, my heart is squeezed in agony, the light dims inside my soul. All I have is questions without answers and nothin' to believe in. Please let me die.
In the post above I speak for no one but myself. College student Tim Cole died in prison after being railroaded by the police and prosecution. He was falsely accused of being a serial rapist but the truth did not die with him - thank God. In the video I took below, his brother Cory tells an absorbing, terrifying and even a heartbreakingly triumphant tale of Tim's odyssey into hell.
Thousands more are out there, huddled in their cells feeling alone and abandoned. Justice can never sleep or we all fail.
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