Revealing Veils
I want to speak to those too ashamed to voice that they feel alone, unseen and forgotten/misunderstood. To give a voice to those that struggle to voice and identify their pain, while helping them rise from its depths. To those that feel judged, scorned and ashamed by their worst moments, and help them realize it’s just a moment regardless how few or many. I hope to open peoples eyes to prison to keep them from coming or coming back. I was a state ward with a mom incarcerated and father deceased. I went from the streets to the suburbs to college to prison. I escaped one statistic to fall to the other. The 2 pros to this con is that I’m alive and I’ve learned, the best thing about pain is the growth in it, so I hope to share mine through motivational speaking and performance poetry.
I am currently an inmate at the NE Dept of Corrections. Although all content is mine, the site is fully run by friends via my letters and writings. I hope to motivate and inspire people through my writings, my poetry or as I call it, “floetry.”
“I’m just like you
I’m no different
besides my perspective
I look out from behind my cage
and into yours
you may look into mine,
yet be clueless of looking out from yours
that may be my only difference from you”
It took being placed in this physical prison to contemplate the things that already had me imprisoned long before. I’m an imprisoned absent father of two sons, a foster child with a mom in and out of prison and a father deceased before my birth being killed in self defense by my mother while pregnant with me. I’m a high school graduate that went off to college and worked several full time jobs paying my taxes. Ohh and I’m black…sometimes it feels like that trait has to be listed on the resume for “perspective” aka stereotype bias or “understanding”. All I want to be is what I didn’t have consistently- direction, resource, and a father:
A direction for people lost like I was and get often times. A resource for people that get out of prison with no emotional or economical support. And a father to my sons that serves as an example of other absentee and imprisoned parents.
I practice being truthful and vulnerable in a place that has no room for that. If I can defy the customs of prison on a day to day basis, then I’m sure in life, I can also defy and help others transcend their conditions inside to make for a better experience outside. I seek to build on this platform, then become a platform, that creates platforms.
I’ll do that through spoken word and music but I need resources to become a resource, naively I believe my truth makes me resourceful. Incarceration and recidivism rates, also failed parole, tell a story not listened to enough. I am that story. The truth isn’t just in the numbers, but the many stories.
I welcome you to live in my shoes so you can feel my walk, and they may lead you to the cries of others, just because we don’t hear the screams doesn’t mean the cries for help aren’t happening. If you see me, then you see us, us that aren’t seen ,heard and counted as much as we are ignored, herded, and counted out.
So please read, if you relate, then reach out, and be a resource.