You see there's a prisoner,
Not trapped in any jail.
Where no amount of money could set the bail.
He was trapped in his mind, trapped in his thought.
He tried to escape for he was left to rot.
There needn't be a guard,
The voices took care of that.
As soon as thought he escaped he'd be be in a darker room.
In each room a way out, the way to his tomb.
He tried taking that way more than once.
But even though he tried he didn't have the guts.
I think that's weak
Maybe for help he should seek.
Now you may think I'm being mean
But the thing is, that person is me

Please don't forget me, don't make me your past
I know time is fleeting, time is moving too fast...
Every second of everyday I'm a prisoner thinking about you
What could have been, what should have been, if only we knew...

Don't make me an old memory that you ignore everyday
Because time keeps on ticking and I might fade away...
I'm stuck in the past and you and me are turning to dust
I've lost all my freedom and we are beginning to rust...

So before we wither and before you lock me into your past
Please know that behind these bars, I have only one thing to ask...
Don't forget me, don't forget all the things in the past
Because I'm a prisoner of time and time is moving too fast...

"Do Not Touch"
The sign I read for this majestic beauty.
It makes me all the more want to know what it feels like.
Does one crave to hold ugly things?
No, I say.
So I continue to stare, breathing in, capturing whatever ounce of this creature,
Without the right to touch.
Thoughts torture the mind with daydreams.
But I can't look away.
It has captured my heart,
I am a prisoner to her.
And so I sit,
Wait,
Stare longingly,
Till the sign is removed.

Or I am set free.

So I sat here writing a letter,
trying to recall events like the weather,
why red and blue have been fighting forever,
the kid in the newspaper with some new fever,
or that house that set itself on fire.

I wrote off the lines and on the back of the page
about a mother and father who abandoned their children,
a street that went up in a riot,
the telephone poles and the trees,
pipelines and the sewers, and their eventual decay.

I wrote, “Will you marry me,” one thousand times
Then I wrote, “I don't love you anymore,” one thousand and one.

I sat here
and I wrote a book that wasn't long enough
it couldn't explain the things I wanted to say.
An AK-47 sent through the mail.
The tower that fell with no plane.
Flower sales and drive-by’s,
what really happened to JFK?
Why wasn't it **** Cheney?

But I barely wrote half of what I could think.
A declaration of war, like it's a game.

I sat here, alone with my 90 degree angles
every night is a race to the bottom of the glass.
A prisoner to my own mind
which I cannot escape.

(Inspired by Ethan Smith's poem of the same title.)

You’ve taken so many different pieces
of others’ personalities
and put them together to form me
that I don’t even know who the real me is anymore…
Let alone knowing that I am still partially you,
as much as I hate it,
I have to recognise it…
and what’s more
As much as I hate it,
I don’t hate you
don’t hate the way you still bore a hole
into my heart,
Remember that.
Sarah…
I haven’t said your name in so long
because I’ve spent years trying to convince everyone-
myself included-
that you were gone,
that you are nothing but a distant, fallacious,
distorted memory,
that the thought of you drowns out my reality
and leaves me shaking and broken
and that at the same time,
I haven’t changed a ******* thing about myself,
but we both know that
that’s complete *******.
We are two completely different people,
you made me feel like a prisoner within myself,
but I suppose you were only doing
what you thought needed to do
to survive.
It’s a shame it didn’t work,
I’m sorry, that we ran out of time.
When grandma said her baby girl had died,
that the light had gone from her eyes
she was wrong,
I told her so
but she’d be incorrect to assume that you
are still living inside of me,
instead you are ticking inside of me,
ticking like a bomb waiting to explode,
Sarah.
The name sounds foreign
your eyes are terrifying me
your old friends are boring the hell out of me;
your voice is one I don’t recognise.
Hell, I barely recognise myself anymore
and I guess I have you to thank for that
But remember
as much as I hate the fact
that you still exist inside of me…
I have to recognise that
I can’t hate someone who was me for so long.

The mason trudges on
night and day to finish
his masterpiece. Clockwork,
he waits like a prisoner
yearning
for the jurisdiction to
fall in his favor. Each
opportunity: he will steal it.
Adhesive to stone and
metal support:
This wall will not
fall. No, this one he will not
let dissemble. Opposing the
prior ruin, plagued
with age and abuse,
the once damaging blows
instead drive this puzzle together.

Attend carefully.
Every door slammed behind
to shut me out,
Each painful stab in your glace
lancing through my chest, into
the black cavity life has consumed
into me.
He will work
to layer his project, this
projection of my cautions, until
the last glimmer of light disappears
behind the last stone in the
last wall. Now a true prisoner,
my mind lies
in contentment.