Under Lock & Key

My father came to prison and got a tattoo
Heart with an arrow through Mom's name
Hepatitis he's sick with swollen liver disease
Mama left him because he drinks to ease the pain
An ex-pig-farmer being farmed now by pigs
An ex-junkie who's made peace within
All the lingering psychotic delusions
An ex-hillbilly progressed into anti-Amerikkkan
Anti-imperialist in an imperialist's skin
I am hated by my family for hating them
Hated by my fellow white Nazi prisoners
For understanding the weaknesses inside of them
I live to sweat and sweat to live
With a swollen liver like my father
And ex-girls like my mother
Not letting me see my kids
Losing everything I was once taught to love
Loving everything I was once taught to hate
I've lost everyone I once thought I loved
In inciting a reactionary's hate
I'm dying though I've just barely begun to live
Hating a family that chooses not to have me
Being destroyed by a country that swears it's correcting me
Sanity's mostly solitary in the land of the crazy
"If what you say is right, you need fear no criticism"(1)
"Democracy for the rich — that is the democracy of capitalist society"(2)
If what you are is a revolutionary, say "Fuck Amerikkkanism!"
Democracy for everyone, i.e. death to imperialism

Six by twelve food cell feeling like
A freshly dug six foot hole
It's the sixth suicide since December
And it's only six twenty-four
I sit and try to forget
When all that's possible is remember
To bleed with no trace of blood
It's like a death with no hug
Dying a death minus the roses
Is like living a life with no one
I called your name at midnight
Took an hour for the echo
I saw your face in my sleep crying
Whispering, whispering alone, whispering to no one
I'll turn twenty-five in two months
But look sixty in the mirror
I'll never forget the smell of vanilla
Us stoned sweetly contented together
I can do a whole year in only a month
I've eaten the same meal five years
The same bologna for dinner, breakfast and lunch
Same curls, shrugs and decline pushups
I can maintain because I know one thing
My life is tied to something larger
I will survive for only one purpose and that's to see my people suffer
No longer

Forty years today Attica rose up
Since then 600 million children starved to death
Pelican Bay comrades we've had enough
A revolution sparked by refusing pig lunch
Cover this one up, oppressor
We've had enough
Supermax solitary choke-holding Attica's sons
Gray-faced and pale captives dying alone
Bricks and steel sucking the life out of everyone
Clench-fisted against imperialism we die as one
Bring in your army and mow us down
Manufacture a coverup you plutocrat clowns
Each one of our body bags more heavy
And sacred
Than a billion of your cracker small towns
Red flags draped over true soldiers' coffins
Reminiscent of those buried beneath Kremlin gates
Red darns rising like earth under stampeding buffalo
Another empire crushed poetically
Like the Greek goddess of fates
Forty years today Attica rose up
And for the first time ever today
One captive voice echoed the world over
As one
One lung
We've had enough

A solid square where one must breathe only so much
You see
We are given oxygen but only so much
Being fed just enough to feed one's hunger
Four paces back, four paces forth
Four cinderblock walls and a rusty steel door
If you think too much you will lose your mind
Not think enough and you will lose your mind
If you cry you'll not be able to stop
Laughing for days
Why
You forgot
Our voices revert to childlike tones
Faces pale as sundried bones
Listening to nothing
Yet hearing everything
Talking to no one
But the faces in the ceiling
Belonging to no one but the struggle against this diseased capitalist state
Silently millions sit sitting
Uneasily, unceasingly — squirming in
Society's hate

Ten years today the towers fell
Since then 150 million children starved to death
Tell us again why the towers fell
Does tragedy count less on child's breath
We stand around as our nation starves nations
Texting, banging and killing each other
Pigs throw us in prison with brainwashing TV stations
Yet we accept this system unquestioningly
Killing each other
Capitalism created gangsterism, open your eyes
Each time we slang or rob a 7-11
The pigs cheer as our mothers cry
God isn't waiting on the clouds in heaven
The pigs created God, too, open your eyes
Hell does exist but it's where the soldiers go
Raping, bombing and Uncle Sam's favorite, genocide
We the people of the prison industrial complex
Pledge to support the world's majority
We anti-Amerikkkans and anti-imperialists
Pledge to come together and defeat your authority
We've done it before and we'll do it again
USW comrades grappling line questions
You can pull your triggers on our pseudonyms
But we'll regroup Hydra-headed again and again
Vanguard party brothers and sisters join up
Maoist study cells and progressive literature
Petty individualism down, the collective up
The captors held captive you have my signature
We create socialism then lock the rich up
Feed the hungry and cure the sick children
Who's the bad guy? It's them comrades. Not us.

Clicking on the cement nails scrape as I motion
Breezeless and stale marinated between want and need
Letters slip through the cracks in my gated community
Shell shocked and sullen as prisons, asylums and death take their feed
All-nighter with exhaustion, your happy hour's almost up
Bleed with me comrade beside cesspooled capital
Talk to me friend as mankind's sun slowly sets
Dead or dying amigo no worse can it get
The worse is over all they can do now is stop the pain
We've already made peace with finality and insanity
Embraced her long lost face beneath the pattering rain
No hope for the white nation but hope for our species
Class suicide's forever hated and chased
No shelter for the homeless nor sleep for the restless
Self-destruct on the construct equals yourself erased
Pain in my twisted back eased by the pain in my knees
Pain in consumer common sense eased by my solitary
Pain is my friend, not heavy, my brother
The pain in your face I've not seen in no other
Obsessive compulsive the captive counts the bricks
Bipolar disorder counting up gritted teeth clicks
Manic depressive jump-roping noose's knots
Lonely humyn male silently, like beads, counting the knots
The beauty in the hurricane matched by the logic of the insane
In the eye of the storm scrubbing windows and storm drains
I sit righting mental wrongs waving goodbye to the gone
Anti-imperialism as my struggle, revolution as my song

I sit doing ten years for a gram of dope
Witnessing Johannes Mehserle get probation for murder
I sit watching men starve to death
Witnessing guards who can't even alight a flight of stairs
Because they're too fucking fat
I sit in a country that told me to stay in school
and educate yourself
In a cell where they won't give me a book
I was told in my youth to just say no
to drugs
And now that I refuse their psychotropics
they refuse me parole
They told me to love thy neighbor
like you love yourself
and now I watch my country men shoot Mexicans
swimming the border
I sit in the land of the free
rattling my chains
waiting
I see the hypocrisy and the bitter twisted lies
Do you?
I sit alone
7.4 million strong
knowing nothing more than to carry on
nothing more than my country's wrong
knowing nothing - nothing's at all wrong
Do you?

Pull the fucking pistol out of your mouth
and pick up a book
turn off that damn bourgeois television
and take a look
shit's getting hectic, brother, sure
But a bullet in the brain, amigo, isn't the cure
It's too late for you, man, but what about your son
What about his generation who's been taught to run
to stomp and tantrum and tattle-tale
suck the plastic flea market and dodge bourgeois "hell"
imperialist sons medicated for depression
A hybrid oppressor slash enemy nation
I'll sell you this for a gallon of that
Then starve the world and die of heart attack fat
It isn't the way it was meant
All these senseless suicides ain't some static event
the reasons exists - the "whys" right here
Your casket costs thousands - payment plan three years
sucking the fucking juice out of life - capitalism
then profiting off of your death - straight sadism
Rent the church to grieve you in
Buy the hole they bury you in
Pay the petty priest to say some words
Then scribble on some gray marble how much it hurts
Picking the pocket of the family that weeps
Dying's expensive while living is cheap
Business in death and death in business
What's the price, father, the price to miss us

Why are you deeply sorry for hurting/disappointing
In a country built on genocide/institutionalizing
In any way - your mother, sister or grandmother
Hurt in degrees - hurt like no other
The pain is here - present - in my chest
But I've learned it from you - who knows it best
Hypocrisy and hate and national oppression
Imperialism and capitalism and poor peoples' depression
We can't see past all the senseless suicides
Friends' corpses beside us - swinging above us
inside us
Suicide wholesale - please forgive us
Sensory deprivations or bought off TV stations
What's worse - alone talking to yourself
or commercials repeatedly preaching consumer masturbation?
Two for one on a half off sale
I for one prefer sensory deprivation hell
My pen, my thoughts - memories get me through
I am the one feeling sorry for you
Bitter cynicism on a Bob Barker mattress
Verses ignorant masses on PC Macintoshes
It's not hate I feel for you - but awe
Goose stepping, concentration kamping, new generation
What's that - what's this - we never saw
Boxcars, traincars - jehovah witness triangles
Vans, buses - poor man and non-white shackles
Business as usual - neo-fascist neo-nazi
A "criminal" boogeyman preaching - how dare he

I went from rice and deer meat
To bologna and carrots
Four wheelers and Honda XR motorcycles
To a stinky Bob Barker mattress
Grew up chasing girls and a good time
Still growing up - still doing time
Mama don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys
To the abolition of classes, the abolition of state power
country music to a dead solitary silence
promising amerikkkan middle class future
To a socialist, communist, bourgeois hater
From a needle to knowledge
Knucklehead to 'never again'
Sally forth from juvenile detentions, prisons, boot camps
only to come back again. and again. and again.
Used to pine away - love sick puppy
over my ex-girls
Now seeking a socialist revolution
and a non-patriarchy, non-sexist world
Faith in God - Gone - turned atheist
Trust in my country - lost - I hate it!
Belief in the people - found - turned non-escapist
A cause worth dying, for - became - most hated
I stand alone now with a couple of friends
Solitary insane, I'll not pretend
Basically I'm just a man now with minimal needs
Mouth silent, eyes bloodshot
The sun sets and rises as my tired soul bleeds