I’ve been imprisoned from the moment I was born: imprisoned by repressive laws and a barbarous system that has criminalized my existence, rendering me a fugitive in my dreams.
Cowardly thieves, sneaking around undercover of broad daylight with a righteous indignation and baying regiments of uniformed henchman who are deployed to silence the voices of dissent in the dead of night: the bloodlust will not be sated.
The oppression and murder were not enough, I had to be confined even further: regularly detained and occasionally arrested; interrogated and routinely tortured; humiliated and maimed. Murdered!
You thought that you could strip me of my soul by tearing off my clothes you tried to demolish my unwavering conviction that yours is the mind enchained.
Despite your relentless, tyrannical persecution, you fail to strip me of my humanity.
Broken and bleeding I embraced the cold concrete and steel; the pain and the imprisonment; you wondered when you saw me lying there then, you thought that I would break but I didn’t.
I was prepared.
I had been prepared ever since you enslaved my ancestors and detained my elders; kicking my mother and beating my father; I was prepared and it scared you further. You thought I would break but I wouldn’t.
The hours and days and years pass in the distance while I count out the seconds to the sound of your footsteps up and down the corridor.
It makes me smile.
I see you there deep inside your own demise, unable to leave; not thinking, just marking the passage of my every thought, imagining a better world; a world I know in which everyone is free and able to live and die with dignity.
And you do not even realize that you are there with me, in this prison and in my thoughts; you do not realize that it is you!
You who is not free to leave because your fear and your guilt and your mindless bigotry has enslaved you and made you ever vigilant, ever watching and unseeing!
I am released and you remain. Serving your time for a bastard father who is dead yet remains to demand your body and your blood and your thoughts and your soul: bowed to the dictate and demand of a despotic patriarch consumed by its own ravening will, being consumed.
And through your bars while you look at me maybe you’ll see the mother; maybe you’ll see another father with a child who is smiling as it points a tiny finger to the future.
I cannot believe that you did not realize that your laws and your jails and your boots and your guns would never again enslave me: the concrete and steel and razor-wire were never enough to restrain me; your plots and your schemes and your lies and false dreams never once fooled me.
I am the spirit of freedom, of equality and justice; I am woman and man, I am their child. I am greater than your futility and prejudice and violence; I am conscious, I am humanity and I will no longer be contained!
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