Stopping Time

 Prison Suicide 1982

You had to go. I know you had to go. 

How could you have stayed, to moulder? 

(Would you have mouldered? I don’t know.

I know nothing. I know I know nothing.)

What good would it have done you to stay, 

seeing only from Inside, the way the world 

would move, open out, the whole vast realm

of the Internet happening so soon – ten years

or thereabouts, in Australia. We might have sent 

emails! Would that have been allowed? What

do prisoners do now? How do the screws

keep track of words going in and out?

I don’t, though (I discover), see you ever getting 

away. Well, maybe when you were very old.

I’m old now. You’d always have been

younger. As it is, you are forever young –

you, who grew old as time in the time you 

served. At last you made time serve you,

cutting it off suddenly, interrupting 

no, not time so much as that place

where They wanted you to stay. Where,

having freed yourself, strangely you do stay.

Find the back story in my memoir, Breaking Into Pentridge Prison: Memories of darkness and light. Available as paperback from Pentridge Prison Inside Out. Soon to be available as an ebook on Amazon.