Choices

Self-propelled in this muddy revelation, the measure of this writing is not to examine crime, but instead to describe how I served almost five decades in prison, did an agonizing fifteen-years in “Administrative Segregation,” or what we commonly call “The Hole,” and at the age of sixty-six I am still healthy, physically capable, and full of zest.

Prison is the world’s biggest soap opera, this theatre fraught with fables and squalor.  Exhumed from the ashes of judgement, there came a day that I examined my own shadowy past.

Launching a crude euphoria, I studied prison like astronauts finding an alien race on another planet.  I feel that our concerns are similar to the free society, but only on a smaller scale.  All the personalities are here; with an onslaught of the chemistry they conceal!

Be that as it may, a cyclone of empathy digs deep in my bones with remorse and regrets of explosion.  Like a spirit in the maze of eternity, I had choices and always knew right from wrong.  I could have become a rubble of fate, chasing drugs and homemade wine, since it was the theme in this brutal world, and with most prisoners pursuing one or the other, my quivering soul entered a realm of command, discipline and fierce drive.

Living on a small farm, it began in 1972 when a humble seventeen-year-old felt a spark of rebellion.  Beaming with trust, and under the influence of adults, I embraced a clan of renegades, adopting their rawhide nature of bad.  With one of them being my uncle, I fell deep in this dust of misdeeds.  Within months here was I, a naïve youth with no juvenile record, stepping through the gates of the world’s largest walled prison for cashing a flurry of stolen checks.

Growing up in northern Michigan, this prison was a harrowing intimidation.  Being confined in a fifty-seven-acre goliath sent tremors through my veins.  Soon I was transferred to a better facility, did my time and got a parole.

In shades of colorless character, it is difficult to grasp how criminals are created, and I am sure each of them has stories to tell.  In stains of condemnation, most criminals lurk somewhere between diminished capacity and spiraling psychopaths and are clever at masking forbidden flaws.

Defying the boundaries of weakness, I have never been a drug-addict or alcoholic and have never committed any sex crimes.  In my mid-thirties old memories came haunting as I waded through ominous years, inhaling a scent of destruction in my wake.  Travelling a rough-shod trail, I became an introverted loner, an outsider who enjoys his own company and associates with six people or less.  Wrestling with tradition, it is wise to be wary in here.  A desperado with no tomorrow, I have spent the past forty-four calendars incarcerated and served yet another three years some time earlier.  With nearly half a century in this element, I know it’s sinister secrets.  These grim institutions of inhumanity, this allegiance of killers, vultures, and thieves, a rogues’ gallery of wavering values and a turmoil of repulsive intent.

 All that being told, I am a voice who battled the saga of prison.  This fractured cauldron of torment, this loss of inherent compassion, this world of plastic people, cartoon gangsters and legends in their Mickey Mouse minds.  These self-serving pariahs whose narcissism flood the prisons like a river gone wild.  This rumbling contamination where old school honor rarely matters.

Always a burden of calamity, how did I retain my health in this avalanche of corruption?  Yes, I stayed away from the drug scene and homemade wine, even though it was always available.  To my knowledge I have only minor problems which are occasional “stomach acid”, and I am “Lactose Intolerant.”  Painting an innocent enigma, the two things that kept me healthy were my choices to eat a balanced diet and rigorously exercise through these years I have sustained.  Feeling the plague of sixteen prisons, there cries two words of caution: “Ignorance and Exaggeration.”  In a cesspool of infinite propensity, it mutates in every corner.

Unlike many prisoners, I do not feel “entitled.”  Echoing this message, it is true that prison foods taste like roadkill which has degraded in the summer’s arid heat.  Prison food is inferior products which were badly prepared, and the kitchen’s sanitation compliance is almost zero.  The result is a litany of foods that are nasty, foul-tasting, and at times on the brink of being tainted, if not spoiled.  I have not seen a piece of bacon or ham in probably thirty years and have not seen an egg in the past ten years.  The list could continue, but I want to say that our diet has become a gutter of mush, mystery meats, and an array of items not fit for human consumption.

The foods with some appeal are soon stolen by the kitchen workers and will be for sale on the black market later that day.  The Food Service staff recognizes this dilemma.  However, flaunting their ugly faces, they look the other way.  I have seen this violation in every facility.  We are extremely protein deficient.  After the theft takes place, the only meats remaining will be items so foul that I refuse to eat some of them, and instead I go without.

While still young I stopped smoking cigarettes and began a running regimen.  Rain, mud, snow and ice, in the hideous heat and the freeze of winter, I always did my runs.  Most days I lacked extra food to reward my body for its work.  Like a phantom fleeing its cage, I hammered the ground of those prison years as the seasons changed and cold presence of doom stalked my footsteps.  In a society of outcasts and outlaws, I adopted a crusade of consuming only prison food and became a trust of elation as I molded my entire being into a finely tuned running machine.

“Prison,” it has been said, “is a stagnant death!”  In a stealth of acceleration, crime is a hazardous way of life, and it usually leads to prison or the graveyard.  Evading this sordid oppression, I had no desire to be in either as I ignited my need to escape.  Carving a gun from a bar of soap and with the help of some tinfoil off a small cereal box, some ink from a pen, and a cylindrical piece of metal, I fashioned a black-n-chrome derringer that looked rather authentic.  Mustering my reckless abilities, I weighed risk-n-reward while being transported from one prison to another.  In a menacing burst of conviction, I tried to over-power two armed officers and had a muzzle-t0-muzzle moment inside a moving vehicle.  Mesmerized by the magic of freedom, like a hissing serpent, I lived and breathed nothing but “escape”.

Snared in this wreckage, every prison was the same, people walking around with empty eyes, lost souls with no direction.  These men suffocating in sorrow, immersed in this eclipse of a stormy damnation and a testament of encroaching finality.  Wayward villains in a chorus of intensity whose standards stumble with warnings of disaster.

Doing life in prison is daunting, and a merciless future to face.  “Prison,” someone once declared, “takes away all that makes life real.”  This diseased drama that breeds game and gamesters, mice and men, junkies and junkyard dogs.  This nightmare of crippling dynamics in a culture of tragedy and challenge, this decimating ruin of mankind.

Following some good behavior, I was transferred to the new maximum facility named “Huron Valley,” a short distance west of Detroit.

This place offered a half mile running area around the edge of the big yard.  In a combustion of energy, I soon powered 18-mile runs every day as I evolved into a “Runner of Purpose.”  And there were times when I pushed even harder as my mission to run long-distance wickedly obsessed me.  It instilled a creeping fever, a radiance of burning exhilaration, that gnawing desire to excel.

Attaining extreme goals inspired my will as bad food and bad shoes overwhelmed me.  In a somber compulsion, I went to bed almost every night with my stomach growling.  In spite of these hurdles, early the next morning I would dominate that running track once again.  I was given a job on the yard crew and saved these meager earnings to buy shoes.

An old Colombian drug-dealer called me “Locomoto,” the Spanish term for locomotive.  Under prison conditions my running advanced so rapidly that I wonder had I started running at ten-years-old or younger, down what path it might have led?

Being a realist, I seen that Huron Valley was “soft,” and quite vulnerable for an escape.  Prison is a gambler’s wheel, a catapult of corrosion, as an aroma of foreboding subtly whispers.  Lusting for freedom, my crime partner at Huron Valley once hatched a fatal plot to escape.  He was the epitome of a psychopath who arranged his mother’s murder so he could apply to the warden for a “funeral visit,” attend the funeral, and with help from the outside friend who committed the murder, he would be able to escape from custody.  Awash in the crosshairs of fortune, the killer was soon apprehended, and the initiator, still in prison, would in venomous denial spend the next three decades in confinement until he was granted a “Medical Parole” and died from Hepatitis-C two days later.

Like furtive demons, our team found resilient ways to get out of Huron Valley and finalized a plan of steely determination.  Engulfed in other matters, the guy who engineered his mother’s murder was stabbed by an enemy and no longer involved in our plot to escape.  At any rate, I have learned that facing danger is when we are most alive.

In heated motivation, two of us pulled homemade knives to commandeer an eighteen-wheel big-rig which arrived to deliver food at the facility.  Coincidentally, the prison garbage truck parked next to the trash compactor and was blocking our direct approach to the sallyport gates.  Around the facility were gun-towers lining the perimeter, and to ram through the double gates would force us to maneuver the eighteen-wheeler straight at the gun-tower positioned next to the sallyport, and most likely take rifle fire through the windshield.  In stern aggression, we instead crashed through the fences.  The first fence was flattened to the ground, seven stainless steel posts, along with the wire fencing which created a wall of absorption and acted like a large “fish net.”  In a vacuum of deflating triumph, this design stopped the truck after it plowed into the second fence, bending its frame into a crumple of damage.

In a show-down of adversity, a seven-man gun squad rushed to the outside of the second fence.  Shots were fired.  One bullet penetrated the windshield and sprayed glass fragments in my face.  There was no more we could do.  All our preparations, sacrifice and bravery were reduced to a flash of failure.  Banished to the bowels of segregation.  I knew that we were beginning a long stretch in the hole.

Imposing in its roots, when the going gets narrow, severe sensory deprivation finds the worst in a person.  Forcing a murky isolation on one’s humanities, prisoners in segregation commonly throw feces-n-urine on the officers, and still others eat their own waste.  Trumpeting a blitz of insanity, two prisoners known to this writer actually severed their own penises.  One used a razor blade, while the other employed the lid of a footlocker as he slammed its rough-cutting edge down on himself.  In screams of decline, these are places where people are forgotten.  I know a prisoner who has been in the “hole” for at least forty years.

Through it all I sometimes drifted away from sanity.  Balanced on the edge of implosion, I entered the fog-lights of psychosis, along with things that attach such darkness in one’s life.

In disintegrating collapse, after the failed escape I languished in my cell for days, totally numb, as I analyzed those slashing moments and tried to comprehend what went wrong!

Due to the threatening nature of this ordeal, the officials hoped to break our spirit by keeping us in solitary confinement so many years that it would alter our rampaging conduct.  Seething in protest, I braced for the cruelties coming my way!

In a weave of events, the first and most critical was the food, since in segregation a person will get very hungry.  I knew about something called a “high calorie” diet, which simply means that a person gets bigger rations.  It would still be “garbage food,” just more of it.

Staring through the scope of commitment, for thirty-five days I threw all food down the toilet.  As the scam unfolded, I filed grievances, and even wrote the warden, threatening him for an alleged conspiracy.  In reply, the warden stated that he does not respond to threats but would arrange or me to visit the health clinic and see a medical doctor.

I argued that I was not receiving enough food to maintain a safe body weight, and he agreed.  For the next two years I received “double food rations.”  I weighed one-hundred and fifty-pounds when my contest began.  At the end of five weeks starvation, I weighed considerably less.  In prison, if one is not willing to face struggle, strife, and sacrifice, then you are in the wrong game!

 A dude once wrote a best-selling book about prison in whose pages he told how he ate cockroaches to stave off hunger while in the hole.  I have gone long-term without food on a few occasions and was not even close to eating cockroaches.  I never believed his “tale of woe!”

Eventually I was sent to a high-security prison called “I-Max.”  Months later I staged a “hanging” to get transferred elsewhere.  In a simple scheme, I used a strip of twisted bed sheet to make rope burns on my neck. I then used a small staple to pierce the skin in my lower leg, extracting blood droplets which were placed on my nose and inside both nostrils.  In final strategy, I placed several rolls of toilet paper on the floor between my bed and the window frame.  Tying the rope in place, I waited for an officer to make rounds.

Seeing me dangle from a rope sent a shout for help.  A team of officers entered the cell and quickly cut the cord, laying me flat on the bed.  I held my breath for a few seconds to make it look urgent, then forcefully released a gasp of air.  Within two hours I was transferred to a nearby facility which had a psychiatric unit.  For meals I ate small boxes of dry cereal and drank a liquid food supplement called “Resource.”  I claimed that the regular food was poisoned.

One night I managed to slip out of my belly chains and hang myself from the door handle.  But it was not my lucky move, since the officer working the nightshift never spotted me and kept walking down the hallway.

A couple days later I did it again.  This time they responded in force.  I was strapped to a bed in give-point restraints as an officer sat outside my door.

Some woman called down the corridor, “Is he dead yet…?”

“Unfortunately, no,” replied the calloused officer stationed outside my room.

Be things what they will, not one official called me a “faker.”

For twenty-five days and twenty-five nights I wore those savage chains.  With no heat in the room in this autumn season I was forced to walk the floor to stay warm.  The smooth steel of those leg irons cut slashes in my skin, still, I continued to pace that cold concrete floor as my bare feet angrily complained.  Sticking to the plan, I played the role of a madman as I sought an opening in the system granting freedom and beyond.

In a frosty mode of collision, I committed horrible crimes in the free society.  Throwing gasoline on the flames, while in maximum-security I once cut another prisoner’s throat who brought it on himself.  Invoking a snarl of treachery, I also assaulted a prison hearing officer, and later twice stabbed a counselor with a knife that I clutched in a hand of vengeance.  Dripping vapors of shame and guilt I feel dirty for my crimes and will be cursed to the end of my days.

Going to the caged yard in segregation I was forced to wear the same coat and hat that another prisoner had just worn.  I was not allowed any gloves, so I wore “socks” over my hands and tucked both hands under the opposing armpits to keep them warm as I ran the entire yard period in those cold and crushing months.  In scathing ecstasy, some officers locked me in that cage for extra-long periods trying to discourage me from going outside during those blustery days, since they were required to assign an officer to stand outside and monitor the prisoners.  Many times, I was the only person to use that small yard in the frigid desolation of winter.

 After one hanging I was forced to take a psych medication called “Haldol,” which left me in a lethargic haze for months.  I do not remember much from those days.

Soon I returned to Huron Valley and the disturbing confines of an isolation unit.  I immediately hanged myself and was placed in a suicide garment called a “Bam-Bam” suit.  I heard that the name originated from the clothing worn by the little boy named “Bam-Bam,” who is featured in the television show, “The Fintstones.”

Back in solitary, I again felt the delirium of being alone.  I stopped eating all food and for nine days did not drink any water or other fluids.  This would encompass the most devastating toll in my life.  This rabid ambition lasted until I saw color hallucinations dancing across the ceiling, and it terrified me.  A psychiatrist named Dr. Proux refused to bend in my favor.  Leaning on the Devil’s pitchfork, and with me now in the vortex of death, I ceased all further resistance.

Years later I told this story to a medical doctor name Ravi Yarid, in 2018.  He did not call me a liar, but his demeanor spoke in volumes, so I confronted him on it.

Looking Dr. Yarid in the eyes, I remarked, “And I can tell you what it did…”

“Tell me, “Said Dr. Yarid, “tell me what it did…!”

Here is what nine days without water did to me:

1. My mouth felt parched.
2. My tongue felt swollen and rough like sandpaper.
3. My nose had a foul-smelling glue-like substance coming out of both nostrils.
4. My lips felt like a layer of tacky glue.
5. My mind constantly remembered all things of chilled liquid, like fruit juice, beer, soda pop and ice cream.
6. I had a rancid smell coming out of my mouth when I blew into both cupped hands.
7. I still urinated, but it was very little, and colored “blaze orange.”
8. And the “hallucinations.”

Eventually I was released from the torture of segregation.  It would be my last time in the hole…!  I just turned forty-one and had finished an aggregate of fifteen-years in isolation.  In a flame of scorching revenge, another prison threw away all my property.  Now I was relegated to run the yard in prison-issue shoes which ripped the toenails off all eight smaller toes, along with bloody cuts in the arches of both feet.

Finding a dispatch of fortitude, several months later I got a job in the library and saved to buy running shoes.  Entwined in a league of vitality, I felt a surge of iron-clad speed and would beat the young guys with ease.

The last holiday event that I entered was Labor Day of 2008, when I was fifty-three years old and still a voracious competitor.  There were fifteen runners and I finished “fourth” in a two-mile run.  The winner was twenty-six years old, so I still felt good for showing a vigorous pride.

At sixty-six years I am blessed with rebounding qualities.  I do not have any arthritis and have a vibrant skeletal system which is both fluid-n-flexible.

I recall when a university x-ray technician looked at me and declared, “Whew, you have huge lungs!”

One day another prisoner remarked, “You always do things to the extreme!”

Yes, that is my style, and it benefited me with impact.  In a swirl of cluster, my only weakness is “food.” Complacent in this medley of custom, most conversations among prisoners revolves around food, with drugs, sports and war-stories filling the rest of their day.  Many of these guys wallow between over-weight and obesity.  Some prisoners resemble fat farm hogs, and they never stop eating.

Tangled in this immensity, there was one guy who became a mist of malfunction.  He grumbled that they would not let him spend enough money in the store.  He was so obsessed with food that he took some to the restroom so he could continue eating as he sat on the throne defecating.  This person could not walk a quarter mile without losing his breath and complaining how bad his feet hurt.

In any event, the food in the chow hall is horrendous, and has always been a “bad issue” in the sixteen prisons where I have lived.  Absorbing the essentials of life, the only beverages that I drink are water, milk, and the diluted fruit juice they give us.  Nothing else!  I need energy.  I need nutrition.  Due to the wretched quality of food, I have learned to eat for fuel, not flavor.  I really like to eat and have the appetite of a famished hyena.

Due to decades of conditioning, I gained a virtue of discipline rarely found inside a prison.  I am the embodiment of good health, and I feel awesome.  I eat unsavory and minimally balanced foods.  I seem to never have a full stomach and usually go to bed hungry.  Each day I drink a massive amount of water.  In a charge of inspiration, I began running decades ago.  That same year I quit adding sugar to my food.  I drank my last cup of coffee in 1991, and I truly enjoyed coffee.  Nor do I drink tea, soda pop, or Kool-Aid.  I also stopped consuming butter in my diet.  In all truth, I do not miss any of it.

Then enters the running routine which became my passion.  I am a “runner,” a hardcore, hard-scrabble runner.  I can run at least two hours non-stop and never break stride.  I would need water, but I am confident that I can conquer a run of this magnitude.

With all this being said, I am not immune to sickness, but who is totally immune!

In early 2018, a strain of flu swamped this facility.  Prisoners were stricken with several ailments.  Then it hit me, and it hit hard!  I suddenly felt sick to my stomach and passed out, smashing my face on the top of a tall trash can.  I suffered a broken nose and lost two upper front teeth.  These were strong, healthy teeth, and now it affects how I eat food and how I pronounce words when I speak.  Needless to say, the prison health care will never pay to implant my two lost teeth.

Following this injury, I spent five weeks in a prison hospital awaiting treatment and finally was transferred out of that building due to attacks of “claustrophobia.”  A nurse called me a “caged lion” because each day I was pacing the floor so many hours that both feet were bleeding.  Diagnosing this polluted scenario, a medical doctor ordered me to be moved out of the hospital.

In prison the slime never stops oozing from the walls.  There is no camaraderie and no loyalty in this raw-dog survival among criminals.  Many prisoners are wolf-pack chameleons with no gravel in their gut.  At the first wound of struggle, they cower and melt into surrender.  Their faltering plan is to get high on drugs, gorge themselves with junk food, and watch television as the years blend into decades and they become broken in blind defeat.

I twice went through a “behavior modification program.”  It was here that I tried to escape with the soap-gun.  I heard that this was a modern science concept, and the “program” had been designed by B. F. Skinner, a titan of the trade.  Sitting on the southern shore of Lake Superior, it was called the Michigan Intensive Program center, and each time took about six months to complete.

While there it was arranged for me to speak with the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, but it was cancelled when I had to leave on a court-ordered transfer.  Then in the course of a second schedule I moved downstate to a better prison and never did speak with them.  These are the manhunters featured in the movie, “Silence of the Lambs.”  The legendary J. Edgar Hoover never saw the benefit of this science and refused to allow its inception into the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  However, following Hoover’s death in 1972, steps were taken to pursue this pioneering approach.  Two agents named John Douglas and Robert Ressler established this unit which immediately proved successful.  Ressler, history will remember, coined the term, “Serial Killer.”

With the motto of “firm-but-fair,” the chief psychologist, Dr. Richard Walter, was a brilliant innovator who years later helped capture the infamous murderer, John List.  The FBI said that they spent eighteen years and a million dollars trying to catch this villain.  Richard Walter, a seasoned profiler, and Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor, formed an alliance which brought this killer to justice within days.  Soon thereafter, Dr. Walter became one of the founding fathers of the “Vidocq Society,” a collection of professionals whose purpose is to solve old murders.  A tenacious patriot, Richard Walter has closed more cold case homicides than any other member of the Vidocq Society.

The program center was “tame” compared to other segregation-units I have endured.  Solitary lock-down is harsh, as it fuels a lack of interaction in blunt force.  Fifteen years in segregation as pensive moments gripped my soul, slamming a fanged hostility rippling through my veins.  It was traumatic and fateful; it was a vanquishing doom.  This insidious mystique fused deep in a thundering mind.  Knowing I was alone in this conflict made me shiver at the prospects of tomorrow, since to have no hope at the end of one’s tunnel is a lightning bolt waiting to happen.  Long-term isolation is a stench of erosion festering in intimate peril.  In pulsating silence, at times those alarms brew primal eruptions and trigger my quagmire of fears.

In the exhaust of this facility is a geriatric ward housing about one-hundred prisoners.  Decaying and terminally engaged, many of them are standing at death’s door.  Because this complex is all one network, when we visit health care it is necessary to walk among these men while the clammy hands of fate close upon them.  A grave aura invades the hallways as a cloudy dread stifles the air.  Sitting in a wheelchair, frail and alone, they grapple with the fear of a prison graveyard and being forgotten for the rest of time.  Recently a plaque was erected on the yard to memorialize all the deaths at this facility due to Covid-19.

I knew a dude in here who at the time was the best fighter in the prison system.  His first name was “Rick,” and he held a seventh-degree black belt in karate.  Using ballistic motions, Rick could knock out people with a six-inch punch.  The knuckles on both hands were big-n-hard and matched the head on a ballpeen hammer.

Still, he had a wailing addiction for tobacco.  During exercise routines Rick would stop to smoke cigarettes.  Years passed and the damage caused to his respiratory system began to claim him.  As his health diminished Rick could barely breathe and was forced to use a wheeled-walker and a breathing device.  Abandoned at the threshold of forgiveness, at the age of seventy-three the Covid-19 virus killed him.

There was another guy in the geriatric unit named J.J., and this dude was a creature of catastrophe.  He murdered his wife decades ago and did a lot of time before being paroled.  He then married a second woman, and sometime later killed her as well.  In a mother of hopelessness, J.J. turned to the comfort of junk foods as he whimpered into a puddle of pity, resigning himself to the ravages of eternal loss.

Unwilling to quell his timid resolve, J.J. abused his body to its end.  Developing diabetes he lost both feet, then later, half of each leg, as he told every person who would listen how he wished he would die.  Then came Covid-19 and J.J. got his wish.

I like to say that I have a doctorate degree in the dark side of humanity.  Especially since my years of experience seem its equal.  I know about prisons.  I really know about this stuff!  With paranoid, schizoid, and grandiose illusions, there is a deceiving line between fantasy and reality as prisoners adopt the persona of young children in their role-playing masquerade of “hard gangsters,” when statistics show that three-fourths of them are sex offenders.  With no credibility and no recipe of worth, this is the landscape where nomads, predators, and a wrath of charred morals make their home, for lifeblood in these jails runs penny cheap, and destiny will call only once!

Prison, in no uncertain terms, is Satan’s sin-castle here on earth, and many prisoners revel in their rot.  It is a toxic plunder of hate-n-violence which seeks no solution and no end.  It is meant to destroy the spirit as it dissolves the last breath of one’s life.  The days go slow and the years go fast.  Nothing happens in our environment to mark the passage of time.  Old age and high technology will be my end.  Every day is the same defect in this portrait of despair and dysfunction.  Each hour is a dismal abrasion.  A reflection of errors one has made along the way.  It is, dare I say, a sobering fatigue of non-existence, hobbled in this scourge of transgressions, this web of misfits, deception and delight.

In here we live on hopes-n-dreams, and old memories fading with time.

Prison does three things:

1. It makes you bitter, very bitter.
2. It brings you to the crossroads of life where big decisions must be made.
3. Then it kills you!

Extinguishing fiery seeds, I recently went twenty-years without any misconduct report.  It was a whirlwind accomplishment.  Garnering a diligent tide, I have dabbled in creative writing for about forty years and have been a distance runner throughout this period.  I never saw myself as much of a writer but had in relentless years been an animal on that running track.  I am a solitary soul, and running is a solitary science.  It demands an intrigue of discipline while capturing one’s masterful resolve.

“Low-grade, low-life, disquieting sins, this habitat where one never wins.”  In the footsteps of Rasputin, my life seemed like a line of dominoes hell-bent on destruction.  Prison taught me two things.  In its lessons I learned how to hate and how to think in this signature of gritty illumination.  Through roiling years, I channeled a rage into honesty and understanding, for no matter how low we sink in life there is still a right and wrong.  To cultivate a beacon of decency is a salvaging redemption indeed.  In flickers of conscience, I developed into a better person where an uncompromising integrity always matters.