The door,
I can see its molding if I scrunch in the
left corner of my cell
and peer through the bars to my right.
Each morning I awake
one day closer to death.

The prison priest, a sometime visitor,
his manner warm, asks
“How are you today? Anything I can do for you, son?”
“Is it just that I’m so easy to kill, Father?”
His face a blank, he walks away.

Play my life back on this death cell wall,
I wish to see my first wrong step.
To those who want to take my life,
show me where I first started to lose it.

1975, Madison County Jail, Wampsville, New York

Source: Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing. Edited by Belle Gale Chevigny.

Of Irish and Lithuanian stock, Jackie Ruzas (1943) grew up in Queens. At parochial school, “I received both an education and bruises from the Grey Nuns.” Turning 16 at Aviation Trades High School, he was invited to quit or be expelled. He joined the ranks of construction workers. “When the sixties brought protest, alienation, and drugs, I joined those ranks as well. It all led to a final curtain on a sunny autumn say in October 1974, when a confrontation between a state trooper and myself resulted in his tragic death.”

Though charged with a capital crime, a jury spared him a death sentence; he is serving “an exile of twenty-five years to life.” He earned a G.E.D., but says he is mostly self-taught, “with a twenty-four year addiction to the New York Times.”

“I realized many years ago that writing provided me with a sense of flight to anywhere I chose to travel. I could leave my cell without sirens in my ears and dogs on my heels. Over the years I have tutored in classrooms in every maximum security prison in this state, and nothing gives me greater satisfaction than being part of an inmate’s journey from illiterate to literate.” He is organizing to restore college programming to Shawangunk Correctional Facility.

His poems have appeared in Candles Burn in Memory Town and Prison Writing in 20th Century America.