Dad got locked up for drunk driving, I guess he didn’t know more about the choice he was deciding Because when we walked in to visit him, The room was cold, faces dark and light dim And there lay my father, a criminal of the law Separated by steel bars and mom and I who were trying to stand tall. As mom and dad argued, madder and madder he got “Bring my son back here” as we walked away, but she did not Had many nightmares, terrible visions of my siblings and I being ripped apart Prison is a hell, and the sight of my father that day can never heal my broken heart As I grew up, I began to learn about the many types of despair Not only through the multiple visits to see my father but within my own glare I landed time in jail on several different occasions because the policeman's quota tells him target anyone not caucasian Cause see I am a spanish speaker and the color of my skin is brown Which got me followed around stores, labeled troublemaker which is suspicious enough for a rub down. And feeling inferior to the white world made prison feel just right Because it gave me a place to dream and hope for a better life while also learning how to read and write. Poetry saved me. It kept prison from devouring me Helped me escape those nights where I would shiver from fear or want die from self loathing and just disappear. I needed to be much more than just anger because I have children I needed to caretaker to And I wanted them to make wiser decisions from the experiences I’ve gone through. Which is why I wrote this book: a place to stand: the making of a poet Because I wanted them and the world to see how much I was growing but also how much time of my life prison had stolen. My struggle started with the constant drunkenness of my dad The more he drank himself to death, the more he made mother mad and sad. It made her do things she didn’t want to do Like sleep with men she didn’t want to. But we needed the money to pay the bills and keep food on the table So I kept my mouth shut to keep things from already becoming unstable My mother married my father very young, at the age of sixteen But the future she has planned wasn’t one she had foreseen She had three children, first a boy, then a girl And no support from father who was gone when she brought another into the world. We moved from place to place, back and forth from Estancia to Sante Fe As dad tried to maintain and gain a job, from which he need alcohol to drink the pain away. When he was drunk, there was no telling what could happen Fighting, Biting, Trapping, Slapping, Hiding in cabinets or drunk driving until the tired flattened Then mom began seeing richard and dyed her hair blonde She told us to no longer speak the language from which we usually correspond He would always say we need to get used to eat american food And mama got mad at me more and started changing her attitude. My dad was the opposite and spoke spanish mostly I loved him very much and we bonded very closely. But when he got locked up, I didn’t see him for a while. Not until many years after his conviction on his drunk driving trial I was growing up, under the care of my siblings, trying to stay out of trouble But of course, being a colored child always got me into a bubble. I was on and off the streets for a while trying to get some money I met a couple people to which some I found lovely, some I found scummy and some who were junkies. The last time I got locked up, I was twenty one years old. Arizona State Prison was the last place I was to ever to enroll Fighting, stabbing and killing each other was the way you transformed. And it was all based on the way you performed. Stepping into this hell was a real deal breaker, Cause the inmates stared at me like they were the undertakers But I met a guy named Marcaron who stayed by my bedside. He showed me the ropes, gave me a knife when I was terrified Of being raped, from which I had to prove myself But that wasn’t helping me change, nor was it anyone else. I was placed in solitude for almost beating a guy to death with an iron pipe The paranoia I felt in that darkness can never be described in the words I type Naked, scared and cold similar to my dad, These are the experiences I wish no one would have, even if they did something bad. I promised myself when I got out of the hole, I would take on a whole different path So I threw myself into my books, learning science, english, history and math Prison makes you do strange things I promise that much But you can’t lose yourself, you must hold on with a hard clutch. Especially through the hard times when death is all you see And in the blink of an eye, your life can end just as abruptly, dare to disagree. It can occur when you’ve lost all hope for a better future When you give in to the criminal and embrace being the abuser And you live by the motto: No one will help you here, you’re on your own And the only thing that will get you by is heart-- que corazon Cause when they deny your appeal and remain behind bars You have to learn to deal with all the pain, the hurt, the anger and the scars. So you open yourself up to new things like poetry And you transform yourself in a hell where you cannot speak potently And you survive in the world the best way you can Cause they don’t want you to survive, especially not as a strong hispanic man.
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