Below zero

Day 73. The sadness and death bleed from my pores in here. The tears of angels and prison tattoos, the bitter hatred laugh of devils and the hours that absorb me. All the love and air, the taste of wind and sun, the mere fire of a gas stove, a 3 a.m. hour of restlessness in front of a window that opens to a streetlight… All of this is a dream now, all of this in my head, my stomach sore from emptiness, my body cold beneath a sorry wool blanket and an over-bleached sheet—the loss of shadows in this cell, the loss of grace...the love for the written word and the sun-torn highways flush with mountains and small stations, a cup of hot coffee next to my typewriter, the feeling of life warm down my arms, is no longer real to me. It’s a grainy film, a mirror I use for my own self-image, and it keeps me going in here. It keeps my blood warm in a sea of cold, controlled environment, a place where autonomy and expression are simply not possible on an outward plane. A place where your own death is welcomed hungrily, because it would be a diversion from the horrible nothing. My life in here is a new, sick dream. I exist by minutes in this cell, by dark hours of uniform garbage. It’s pushing 9:30 p.m. and we’re celled in for the night...Know that I write this with a gun to my head, while every 15 minutes the hacks walk by and make their count, while the lights of the cities across the States are lit and waiting for spring to burn off to summer...what I wouldn’t give to feel my bare feet in the grass, my hands upon warm dirt. I sit in this concrete box freezing. The pencil moves across the page while outside my shadow looks around for its body.