Caged creatures
Growl at one another.
Youth, primed for life,
Placing first one foot…
Then another
Into the cesspool of a culture
Where they don’t belong.
Dreams faded, jaded and defined
By the moldy smell of dirty money.
Old, wrinkled white men
Making laws, standing judgment
Over black, yellow, red, brown
And poor white folks,
Just wanting to live the promised dream.
Spirited women searching for
Lives without being chastised or despised,
Pedestals unattainable.
Razor topped walls shred sunlight,
Wrought iron doors closet sins that never die,
But compound, like interest,
In a social bank account
That doesn’t exist for the cardholders,
Just like investors whose credit lines
Are governed by dreams deferred.
Ruined bodies, broken minds,
The mangled souls of families that no longer exist.
Friends once had,
Moving on without a care
Or backward glance.
Behind locked doors,
Cries can be heard,
Young men gone bad,
Ruined further,
Lost manhood.
Unsure women,
Afraid to shower.
Both taken by the legacy of decades,
Years, weeks, days, hours of rotten time,
Breeding wadded genocide of generations gone,
By the way of soulfully flushed toilets
Into the wombs of bloated sewers,
After count, at the stroke of midnight…

ABOUT THE WRITER. Preston Shepherd is new to WITS, and I am glad he chose to contact us. Mr. Shepherd is a poet, striving to share the experience of being incarcerated with the younger generation, in the hope that they might avoid that path. Mr. Shepherd can be contacted at:
Preston J. Shepherd
BP7188
4B-1A-107
P.O. Box 1906
Tehachapi, CA 93581