They came in the middle of the night as they do
crumpled in a catatonic somnambulant stupor,
stone cold molded to mrsa laced cell benches,
floors with black mold splotches scattered and
mad banging blasts of batons and bitches’ yells
through bullet proof windows looking out and into
the overcrowded bodies shivering and fetalized
in various states of dress, undress, partial dress.
Picked up without warning, no warning but panic
and running from parties, trips to the supermarket,
dance halls, bedrooms, hangouts on the streets,
of pink, purple, green, magenta or ray blue ratted
hair, tattooed arms, legs, faces, and necks, pierced
faces and breasts, rotten and missing toothed,
blotchy skin pimpled, bruised, track armed, skinny,
bloated S/he’s from teens to terminal, mid to low.
And they slept for days, awakening only to the yell
for meds, health checks, court, chow, count or call
but barely scraping their hides from their sheets
for the shouts, curses and kicks of their cell mates
to get up and out or get t.v. rights and room taken
causing everyone around them to suffer more while
the days on end of motionless moaning sleeping
keeps on blacking them out from the painful blame.
It’s just like those left behind, on the streets, and
in the car–their kids, their dogs, and their wo/men,
their mothers they abused, their fathers who left
their sisters and brothers they don’t even know of–
some of them learning how to get high at 9 years
when dad or mom showed them how to burn even
and how to smoke it until it made it all smooth cool
and smell like the chemical resin burning off wood.
Those around them suffer while they sleep and
awaken to too much lost time and commotion
until they emerge day after day after day then on
to a slowly formed former human participant–
mother, daughter, sister, wife, partner and mate–
who smiles, cares about others and herself to
protect those she loves and comforts strangers
in a sisterhood of sorority chat, slights and H/er.
And just when their skins clear, their hopes appear
they will go back–to the streets, to the madness
to pimps and scams and stealing and ever to H/er
their mistress, the one they all know and sell for
their soul, their children’s, mothers’, fathers’ and
partners’ and mates’, all for H/er–what no one else
can give, the thrill that only their mistress gives
then takes and takes and takes and takes and takes…
In the gaze of the other 
Sad and desperate lives locked away to be forgotten where it is often hoped they will just die. A single decision made on some day in their past they can no longer remember – the day or their past – that diverted them from a smooth paved path traveled by most other sheep, has brought them now staggering comatose and damned down a dark, muddy, overgrown path toward a pasture of gravel and overgrown weeds. Having given away their souls for the magic beans that punish their veins and gnaw upon their brains they now reside in hollowed carcasses of rotting flesh. Strange, they began their journeys so long ago hoping to escape a prison in their mind that they imagined, yet are now unable to escape this battered and withered form where their dead lives are stored until they return to dust. Many a vixen mistress or seemingly seductive siren has lured such as these who sail upon seas of false promises to various tortures till death. And yet, although they are seen with their desperate outstretched and begging hands they are cursed and ignored. They are left to drown in the indiscriminate unrelenting undertow that has gripped them. Oddly, many have acquiesced to the inevitable unwilling to return to the paved path, a path they saw as more horrendous than the one they chose. At any moment of any life any of us may be seduced by such a mistress.
Compassionate post you wrote, thanks. For some of them, their only crime is poverty. It is a scene of sorrowed loss, a skimming off of the most desperate layer of the streets and larger society that revolves through jails and prisons.
Was wondering when I might see this,…. a courageous return. This must have been hard to write, Being able to say “ya, that is the place well described” through this writing is a release in itself. Thanks.
The sadness of the dungeon of crime and addiction is overwhelming.