The Boy Inside The Man

It’s cold, so cold in this cell
A cage I’m locked in….like an animal screaming for help.
But who’s going to save me? Who? The guards, the Prison’s system, the court?
NO! Hell no, they can’t even hear me…!?
So, days and days go by that I’m locked up, up in my cage---until a guard or “cellie” asks me my name….

What’s your name? Who are you? They ask…I sit up and look at them like they’ve given me a jigsaw puzzle to solve—because to me, right now, my identity’s a mystery.
Who am I? I don’t know that for sure….I can tell you my name and who I used to be….
But I no longer am that young, that naïve-because know that boy has been buried inside of me!!
I can’t see him, but he’s there. I can’t feel him but he lives inside breathing the same air I breathe. I don’t l know it because to me, I’m a man who’s finally grown, spending his childhood-his adolescence / teen years in prison.
I don’t see a boy (even though he cries when I’m heartbroken or depressed/miserable and abandoned?

I don’t see the boy (even though he laughs and jokes with his family like he’s been doing it for years)
I don’t see the boy (even though he jokes with his wife, so easily if it’s natural and plays with her and teases her as if they were back in high school)

I don’t see the boy (even though he likes to play cards with his family and enjoy childhood memories)
I don’t see the boy---but even if I don’t see him, that doesn’t mean he’s not there. My family sees him, they talk to him, laugh with him and play with him. He’s there….alone, and kicking.

The boy inside in the man, that tends to come out…..the boy inside the man---that had to man up, grow up and understand…..

Understand the choices he made led him to this. Understand there are no friends to call when you need to vent, no privacy to scream or cry out your pain.

It’s all there, for those to see….look and see the boy inside of me. So, do I answer the guard or “cellie’s” question with a simple “nod” and let it go, show that I don’t care to answer----or should I go in for the kill, catch them off guard with the questions I’ve been asking myself?

I think on this for a minute and then I decide…. I’ll tell them my name, and leave it be---because they’re questions that I’m asking myself, no one else can answer but me.

So I say to myself, let me find the answers I’m looking for…let me find them for myself….

And I will find them and find them soon…. I’ll find them in the boy inside the man!!