some will rob you with a six gun, some a fountain pen...

sang Woody Gutherie
on Pretty Boy Floyd.

He sings of an outlaw that some know, and some don't. Everyone who has been in a tough jail, like they threw me in for my impunity of challanging them, leaving me unmedicated for the first time in ten years of chronic pain from all the back surgeries and radiation they blasted me with after the wings growing. Or they just messed up one surgery really bad... or all the bones were weakened by the radiation to stop what they always told me were tumors... Until this awakening started.

Jail. I was treated by my fellows quite fine to my face, for the most part. They assumed I am a junkie, because I was hurting without those pills, and the only time I got any sleep was after a super hot shower, then walking across the cold domitory... laying down for about the twenty minutes the pain died down... only to awaken with the pain in another hour or two. I took so many fucking showers. And I guess that people do this when they are 'jonesing,' which never happens to me because I simply take medication, and have always avoided addictive drugs.... when not using them to alter my senses, and feelings, which I have done inthe past simply because the drugs are so readily available to me. I am very legitimate about everything in this world...'

To the criminals types I was in jail with, I was either a pillhead lying about being addicted, and people respected someone for just balls out denying any crime... or I was really sick. They went back and forth until I finally got my pills and turned into a normalish human being....

Now, before I describe the ward I was on, let me say this is not one of the really shitty ones. There were no gangs trying to control everything, or steal... which is rampant on other floors, I guess. The gangs there even make you trade food to get toilet paper. They try to steal peoples food, and will if they do not fight back.

So, understand that though I was with some people who have killed people in gang fights and shit, they were all fine inside. People just want to get along without conflict. And on this ward, they actually shut out the lights for a few hours.. on the other wards, there tv's at both ends of the rooms night and day. This ward was particularly run by a big guy who mopped and cleaned every day. I could tell he had some thing going with the guards because he was in charge of giving out the food and calling little meetings and shit. He had been in there a year... his wife, meanwhile, on the outside got a settlement and quickly lost 4 grand at the boats, and could not bail him out.. this happened a couple days before I came in and his mood was dark but he was nothing but gruff with me. I liked him. He could not believe I really was ignorant of what person is supposed to be like in jail.

Like they taught me to scavange peoples mattresses, blankets and pillows when they left... you had to have this all set up. A lot of the guys there were nice to me, and I ended up having everything I needed and enough to give out to new guys who came in like me, on my first night, with half a pad of foam and a worthless scrap of grey cloth.


but this was not one of the worst areas in this jail by any stretch....

They were not the violent types in the medical ward, though they all seemed to belong to some gang and have been in jail before, and a surprising number had been shot. I was just amazed by these young kids, barely 18, acting like they were at camp. They were just hanging out with their buddies, trying to have fun. They all prided themselves on this jail being nothing. Bitching, I learned in there, is a thankless sport. It always makes a situation worse to sit there bitching about it, and being in jail is not one of those problems you can clear up with a phone call or a a prayer.

During this period, psychically, I should write, for the sake of the continuity of when I went to jail, that it was during the period of which I write, I had just come off the drug that made me feel like I was losing my mind and made me act like a lunatic.... I do resent them drugging me a lot. I am still in some kind of cone of disbelief on a lot of what the government has done since I was suddenly done since I eposed myself.

I never in the least considered myself a threat to anyone. I wrote kind of violent humor, but that was a character... a mean character, who was meant to take the sting out of writing about actual killings, and such. The Itchy and Scratchy Show... in a way. THough I have no idea how much I have been influenced by the Simpsons, I know it to be no small amount. MAtt Groening's other cartoons run in one of the more popular free newspapers here in chicago, and I love his work. I try not to draw direct correalations to influences, because I do not like to think about what influenced me and what did not. I sponge inthe entire world, then drip it out onto this page.

So there I am in the Cook County Jail Medical Center. THe first night there, I was given half of a foam mattress, and a filthy, tiny blanket with a huge hole in it, making it preactically worthless. THe first day there, as I began to be asked what my story was and I explained my hellish pain, which they could see -- a lot of them were hurting in the med unit, because the medications they give are nothing. They all told me it would take a week to get my prescription filled... except the ambulance driver who came onto the locked dormatory to pass out the pills, who always acted like my asking where the medication was the problem. Such a bitch. THe guards were all outside, mind you. They came in and did a count a few times a day.

There was no violence on the ward during the ten days I was there, though I did come close to punching people a couple times. Especially this one dude, who I would have got into a fight with, except it was like three hours before I was getting out and there was no way in hell I was going to jeoperdize that fact. When you are in jail, your entire life ripped away and all the social customs you have learned kind of tossed out for a criminal code... you do not want to be in terrible pain.

After a couple days of laying in bed getting all the pills I could from fellow prisoners by trading away all of my food -- the food was so disgusting i didn't eat for my first couple days there. Between the pain and the withdrawels, I lost like ten pounds in those ten days. I tried to get through with a lot of prayers. I could not believe that God had allowed this to happen to me, though as soon as I was out i KNEW I was a better man for the experiences. I will work for prison reform for the rest of my life. These other guys were in there mostly for drug and drink related crap. THough quite a few were also in for hitting somebody. THey were in for all kinds of things really. One guy had come in to serve some kind of ten day sentence, and, so he told me, his cane got switched with another guy's at some point in the check in process... and when they xrayed the one he ended up with, it was stuffed with cocaine. I guess they do this to people, because they know that there is going to be a point where they take all the canes from people and throw them aside. Another guy told me this guy was lying, that he had tried to smuggle in the coke.

They were all quick to denounce each other behind their backs, all of them telling me 'that guy is just trying to get shit out of you, man,' so don't trust him. One guy I played scrabble with over and over. There were only two guys who played, so I got in on the games. THey had both done a lot of time, and played board games all day to pass their time. Over and over. They would play a few hours, do something else.. one guy had the official book... scrabble acknowledges all these strange words, and these two had all of them memorized. I didn't much care who won or lost during these games, which bothered the other two. They thought I would feel better if I beat them, etc. I won exactly once. Played probably fifty games.

They finally medicated me three days before I got out. And they gave me two weeks worth, so I immeidiatly began sedating myself with extra neurontin. Like three cons mentioned it was nice to see me sleep. By then they all knew me as hurting... they were a little surprised how normal I became then, when I had the pills. Oddly enough, just before I got them, I had had my tangled hair cut off. After growing it all those years, I could not stand the shit. The stupid half comb they give you just broke into peices when I tried to use it.

I found out, during the period after I had some medication for the pain again, this one guy started telling me that everyone said I was a pill head. I understood then, how I had been looked at by some of them. I mean, they all had motrin, because you come in with it. And the trading of food for shit goes on all day. They commissary is once a week, and they all get these chips and snacks and stuff --- some get enough to trade for weed and smokes. This was rare, but I knew a few people who were getting high. I do not want to say how they got the drugs, but it was ingenous and complicated and required the entire dormitory to mind their own business.

I came out that jail determined to make clear with a lawsuit that cook country cannot treated sick people waiting for trial to a week without their medications. People were havingt seizures and shit during this week. Various lawsuits have been brought and the people always win. I called a lawyer on this point, and they kind of acted all tricky and then never called me back. People think I am going to run to a lawyer at some point and try to sue people for what has happened to me. I just want them to let me go on, give me a fair shake selling my books, provide for my family.

Of course, I would like more than that. I want to save the world. And that will always be my goal, but to do so I must exist here now as a man... and trust that God My Father has his own plans, and that he will reveal to me what I need to know when I need to know it...

I dwell on the recent past too much. I could think of nothing else for months. And I mean that literally. Days would go by with me just laying on the couch going over and over the extrodinary events that have happened to me. What a world I live in. What an undiscovered mish--mash of truth and lies people live by.

So, people, remember your relatives in jail, make sure they have some money in the commissary. God bless the prisoners.













You are welcome to spread my poems by whatever means... they are yours... unless you make some money off of me and then I would like some. Is that too much to ask? No. I have a family, too;.