By Swavell Toliver
Prison life?! To paint a picture in a few short words, I would say prison is a monotonous tool for uselessly warehousing commodities once known as human beings.
Prison is a hair-trigger, violent, soul-sucking re-run of the worst day of your life. The physical body of prison itself is an increasingly dilapidated, drab, rodent infested, monochromatic colored culling pen that birds expertly nest in. And I mean real jail birds. Pigeons and such that choose to make the prison their home. So, prison life, wait, you can scratch the “life” part. I’m telling you from first hand experience that prison truly is an extended, mind-numbing pause in the progression of what should be one’s life.
These few words are not haphazardly strewn together to describe a thrown away human experience, once convicted and imprisoned in the “Department of Never Actually Correcting Us.”
A feeling of slow suffocation exists behind these 30-foot walls, or higher, and barbed wired fences that poorly mimic an attempt at suicide by exhaust fumes in an abandoned garage on the South Side of Chicago. It makes you swear that, late at night, at least sometimes, when you’re finally able to allow yourself to somehow relax a bit in order to fall into an imitation of your deepest sleep. While straining to keep one eye up somewhere in between half-hour blinks, that the C.O. paid off your cellmate in a few extra, cold chicken trays from lunch to smother you just enough to make you 
subconsciously consider the sweetly advertised siren song of suicide in the morning after your cup of John Wayne and your daily, “Damn! I can’t believe I’m still in this bitch!!!” Which is why I stay away from Taster’s Choice to this day.
And it’s how I think I developed asthma here, from choking on dead skin cell particles. Lungs invaded by scabied-out, mutated dandruff flakes and bits of rotting cotton crumbs that fell through the poorly stitched pillow that “Fat Cat” inherited from any one of the thousand maniacs, excuse me, I mean, “Individuals In Custody” that slept on it before him. And I’ve definitely seen him trade off his last bar of soap for another piece of that greasy, over/under fried bird too. So, I know he’d be down with taking me out for a few extra pieces.
It’s either that, or a thick, viscous, homicidal humidity vacation all seasons in the penal system. This attacking all senses’ system. This dry cistern.
My sister—I hope she puts money on the phone soon because I’m really thirsty for love and some real human interaction. And I need to tell her about the shape of this pool of blood I saw that time when Sergeant BJ got hit with a fan motor. It formed a scene from the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. Now, if you can, please forgive the schizophrenic babble of one displaced by time. Time Doers.
“Time Doers,” also known as wild storied failures in society. Some of us have newly-found knowledge of self or feign we have well enough.
Others are steadily evolving dissectors of law and letters from time’s past, written in Birmingham jails by Kings. Improbable aristocrats were labeled now by thugged out, would-be Baldwins, who go by names like Yusef, now in the cellhouse. Or maybe we’re still just reluctant Messiahs, trapped in coffin-esque cells for the foreseeable future awaiting some form of resurrection.
But on some real shit. Just the other day, I had a dream that I was free. It felt so incredibly real for about a minute.
I was home, laughing and joking, chasing my girl around the house when a tiger with a monkey’s face jumped on me from out of the blue knocking me to the ground, and the next thing I know, I was being dragged to seg. But it’s crazy because you dream you’re free all the time in prison.
All there is is stagnant time to dream of what you could be doing, other than time in prison. Just don’t forget to scratch the “life” part because this is NOWHERE near living.
