Poetry and Artwork by Raymond White

Dreams Beyond This Cell
By Raymond White

I have dreams that live content
An inner happiness at peace; beyond the
Captivity of this cell
It’s lonely-painful-existence, becomes
Vacant unintentional no longer a part of me.

The dreams stretch free and deep
Into places of civil existence
Where unknown worlds can be found
And apart from my own dark-diluted
Nature are dreams that travel like soaring
Birds into fortunate worlds, lands where
Opportunity could never not be given
These illusions are an inner-creation of mind
That lives in reality

Under the realization that my heart could be
Compatible to a city that holds no barrier, no chains
Guards of lawful inconvenience are no longer
The reason what I am lonely and miserable
Because that blazing sun has shined its
Free beam upon me once again

I have dreams that a prisoner no longer
Exists inside me soul, is a home where
I can be free again.

Dreamer
By Raymond White Jr.

My grandmother enters into dream – eerie but anxious
For after result, her conscious carries her feet up the
golden stairway, up above a illuminate highway
That guides her soul up to the North star,
Where she dances onto the crescent moon in joyful spirit
That perpetually embraces her,
She is an infinite silver eagle for the time being – wings fluttering
Across the scarred, quiet and lonely orbit,
creating sound by voice, with distilled and lowly character
Her conscious carries imagery from a past life of before
Painful memories of an outcast, touched by an angel
She is a goddess of her own sparkling eternal
And glorious world, evolved from the loneliness, rejection,
grief and shame she felt long ago in ancient years,
inside a city of ruins, no flesh of shadow haunts her spirit
anymore, she is released to the soul of the open sky,
The diamond universe of god greets her by acceptance
Swimming into the dark sea of endless space,
And becomes a companion with the map of a million stars
Now free forever.

When The Winds Blow
By Raymond White Jr.

Each day in prison, my eyes pour repeated patterns
of silent loneliness,
spewing oceans into many years full of pain and sadness.
Behind a captive window, I watch the winds blow north
across the peaks of the hollow mountains,
and then I become a Savage covered by dark rains
of an unearthly inhabitance,
My tears keep falling, creating distress
beyond golden eyes of a lost freedom sky,
and then this world becomes a paralysis of mind.
When the winds breeze south, I feel nothing but cold dreams
of lost civil memories,
until the storm decides to blow further away,
Far away, from the frame of my caged ravished existence,
I am left with no other direction to turn.

Captive Zones
By Raymond White

One bears such forth grief with misery
Once beauty defends to fight with pain
I have dreamed of lost paradises – lonely mystery
Of high skies heavenly night burning flames
Between the daily suffering locked in hours
My body held captive laid on concrete cold
The cell walls fill me with claustrophobia
Has only engraved my soul in stone
I exist amongst complexity of dreadful times
Where chambers cave are my go to home
And sunrise rays beaming free outside
Has no streak way through captive zones
I bear such more grief and misery
No humans perception can viably frame
I have lived life dwelling upon unknown mystery
Where freedom has no name.

A Princess of Passion
By Raymond White Jr.

The sunrise has refracted across the grave lands of earths sadness,
we wear woven fabric on our hearts to cover our grief, rustic as the time of earth occurs
from the beauty of our princess’s shadow,
whose lighted spirit has traveled among sweet mystic airs of afterlife.
While, her presence stood tall, firm, held by courage grace
to affection, to the motherlands of all mothers, children, and men
whose eyes dare to meet the simplicity of her beauty
and enchantment. She had partaken quaint stature,
for idealism so graciously possessed,
she transpired change for many, fair to all,
despite their weakness of wealth, privileged disadvantages
where she became a humanitarian, gave donations for charity,
for those who had very little to receive,
sacraments were given to share her communion
of luxury, to all so well deserving, she stroked the sadness
of tears off poor men, women, and children’s faces.
Her desires became affirmative for histories treasure,
towered over any castle built by human labor,
now the sun greets her daily, by the grace of her immortal beam,
radiant as she were, she seems to have never lost a speck
of shine. She had made beautiful memories with her sons
at Balmoral, the highlands of her beautiful heart have marked
The world landscape in all purity,
she was much more than a teacher for children, but an instructor
for each gender of age. We stand and give our condolences
by the tombstone at her grave,
the world tilted sideways; tillers lost their balance
from the news of her loss humanity went into deep silence,
tears billowed into dark rivers of many ghostly streams
left with no guidance. But bless be her spirit for all the great
deeds of miracles to fulfilled dreams she handed to others,
inevitable gave her life of wealthy inheritance made her
a princess, and at the edge of that valor, the heavenly angels
had gave her a token to a more deserving queen,
for all England’s eternity,

R.I.P P. Diana

Lost Adrift
By Raymond White Jr.

I’ve sailed on a few lone ported ships
I have voyaged in many dreams of exploring
thousands of FREEDOMS open seas,
I have seen two thousand happy sunrises
fall into too many sad sunsets,
and I was left alone drifting among the aching blue horizon.
Til this day the hallow reservoirs washes through me,
in surging waves beckoning me,
for which imbued in me three thousand open secrets
of golden shores not found,
(A teacher of natures drift I have yet to be receptive).

I have seen the glory of the golden horizons
fall into the night of sleeping stars,
where my faith was left alone wandering like a ghost
amid a vacant shore.

And this is where I’ve been all my life
living in fantasy’s of reservoirs reserved for me,
but in reality never fulfilled,
in memory this is where I’ll come back to,
lost adrift a dark ocean of surging waters.

A Soul of Snow
By Raymond White Jr.

How much further shall my strength and will go?
All my life the painful emotions of me
Have been blown away into the winds of
Winters cold snow
Where obscurity is an infinite black temple
So steep! So steep!
Life’s dreadful temple too tall for me to reach
Dear Lord, how much more of air I’ll breath
I can’t keep this cold body of life’s impurities.
Today, I bow be weakened on my fragile knees
Inhaling, exhaling, lungs burning, my heart beating pain.
Feeling like my spirit has left me by fleet
I cannot turn away from life’s inevitable disdain
That has burst my heart out of my chest
Weeping, weaving, I struggle more than the rest.

Tonight, I pray, tomorrow, I praise, you my God,
My faithful, my loyal superior star
Star no matter what, I keep in touch,
To overcome all of life’s
Unearthly odds.

No Longer a Criminal to a Victim
By Raymond White

I mean this sincerely over the Years of unbearable pain
That I sadly inflicted (I am so sorry)
When I covered many innocent civil earths
With violence’s most malicious rage
To these dear people, I am gravely sorry
For the depression and distress I caused you
By Faultered actions display
Thundering across the civil world a menace subtle
I had refuted and was astray
From my own dignified and legitimized self
And criminal justice convicted
I didn’t; realize it til now, as the body of heart grows
Mature (and minds soul consumes life more wise)
I am sorry again for causing you grief, pain and strife
For I wish for your forgiveness
As motion of time wavers the old scars by
Today I revise my heart!
From all self-perplexity’s long term pain
That has severed the past traits of my character
I was entrapped in austerity of night’s coldest rain
I would like to dry your teats to nurture you
To remedy all the revolted actions that left my civility in vain
Dear Victim, as I am writing you this poem
Inside a four sided stone wall cell
I contrite for your acceptance, no longer a criminal
As positive character prevails
We shall cross paths someday
And by genuine embrace I hope your spirit yields

Bullets Penetrated Through Childhood
By Raymond White

Little does the civil mind know and understand the (heinous nature that breaks into a menace’s childhood.)

During my youth around the year of 2001, when I was at fourteen years of age, born and raised in the central part of Fresno, California, I was introduced into the hood, but rejected its gang criminal like standards. But, through unsanitary living conditions, low income housing, bad influence and the use of heavy drug consumption that polluted the city’s air in humane revolt.

For some reason, I still see myself as a gangster, based on the unruly and unabiding actions that I displayed: Such as beating people up for senseless reasons, robbing liquor stores to prevent my pockets from getting too low in cash. These actions I demonstrated were vastly immoral.

A lot of childhood gangsters, unlike me, decided to engage in criminal conduct, that harshly initiated detrimental and chaotic events. Such as, drive-by shootings down peaceful and civil neighbourhoods of houses that rival gang members’ families were stored in.

These innocent people, who ask for nothing such as what brutal effect from nature’s tragedy, for which they had sadly received the inward effect of a hot stray bullet, specified with a particular name and body, but sadly entered into the flesh of innocence.

I’ve seen loved ones, (people I grew up with) die from all these “All out” gang bangers.

I have attended various funerals, because of the detrimental after-effect caused by the casualty of war.

But as for me, I might as well been a gang member, because I lived a life of crime, that stretched its way into life’s painful majority. But though I was not affiliated, I’ve done heinous things, just as bad as them, but can they say that “I NEVER FIRED A GUN”?

That I am proud of.

These gangsters who grew up without fathers, that should have teached them the irony of moral values, had very little men that could guide them into the value of virtue.

Though I had, and still do have, a terrific father, whose heart expands further than the gifted hand and soul, I had consistently avoided his beneficial wisdom and care during my teenage years. I was more focused on my selfish needs and criminal acts and not receptive towards his knowledgeable desires.

So, again, I was not a gang member, I used to duck and dodge these unintentional hot lead bullets from killing me. Due to altered minds from gang banging, corruptive politics, I was not a thug officially, but lived within its toxic environmental system, that evidently guided me into the criminal justice system (prison). But the accumulation of pain and trauma stored inside the childhood soul of misguidance has shed more tears and bullets than a soldier’s gun at Vietnam War. At least, many soldiers carried the option to withdraw from this chaos.

While others were born into it.