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, 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.