Oh shoot, the storm troopers just came to my door and told me i'm moving to D-1-210. The Island. Remember we talked about it before? Well, i'm sure they're gonna take all my property and not let me have a lot of the stuff i've managed to accumulate over the past 7 yeas. Books, papers, etc. So let me get ready for this move. I've got to mentally prepare myself. They gave me 5 minutes to pack my stuff. I"ll get back when i'm settled in!

Here's a thought...

Belief and faith are seed and soil
Study and intuition are sun and water
Knowledge the root
Experience the tree
Prosperity the fruit!

can you dig it?

I suppose one reason it seems i'm always focused on the poor quality of life is because my incarceration, the captivity of a million Black men and women, 1/2 of the entire population locked up in Amerika, is an extension of the whips, the cutlass, the branding irons, the dogs, the shotguns and noses that once tore into innocent flesh, severed bone from body and breath from life!

Only these modern day shackles are psychological, the physical unsightliness has been done away with, hidden from tender eyes; in laws like 3 strikes, mandatory sentencing, immigration reform, wars on drugs, crime, homelessness, poverty, and other lies.

Things here are fair to middling. I hate to write sometimes because i don't want you to get the idea i'm always down, depressed or in a foul mood. I'm not even in the worst of times and places. There are moments, many many moments, that add up to days of grace and hope. In all honesty, i'm one of the chosen few who are specially blessed.

I have the love and support of my family. I have wonderful, supportive, loving friends - my extended family in key and G and now out of the blue an old love, actually my first love. T has reappeared in my life. If, as usual, she only stays around for a season, it will be a glorious season, as it always is when she shows up!

Don't people realize, that as a Black man, i'm aware of the fact that when they use racist, stereotypical, and hate-filled remarks bout others in my presence, they'll be using the same types of remarks about Blacks when i'm not around? Do people really think other people are that stupid, not to notice that the only reason you're not addressing me in the same way is because i'm in your presence? That's why every Black person (all people, jsut especially Blacks) should get really offended when they hear those types of remarks!

That's one fo the things i truly love about being a multiethnic Black and having the experiences i've had. A lot of people pay lip service to not having racist hangups and all that, but once you live in multiple worlds, you experience the best and worst of two cultures. You truly come to see that, in general, people are all the same. Humanness is universal and everything else is icing on the cake.

I think i'm becoming less willing to share my thoughts and ideas, to discuss what's going on in the world and around us. I've already, over the last 11 years, become someone i've never been, and i'm afraid i won't get the old me back. I've become more closed off, untrusting, introverted and suspicious of other people's motives and intentions - a very necessary and life-saving disposition to have cultivated in prison. However, i know it's eating me alive inside. it blocks out my sunshine and won't work when i have a relationship with a woman again.

I can't be human and be this way. It won't work. But, i'll never be human again if i'm not this way. I won't survive. I just pray i'll learn to turn it on and off as need be!!

Everyday stress. Sometimes i swear i can't tell who's more ignorant - the K9s or the convicts. Just imagine living in your bathroom, with 9 other men, all of whom are under some illusion of class, gender, or race superiority. Some...most, under all at the same time. You can't see one another but on the rare occasion one of you is let out of your compartment, your bathroom sized cage. All of our sense of depth and sound has been torched, eroded by the constant humming of industrial lights, toilets and various other sounds that make it seem you're in a working machine shop or warehouse where pipes and metal are being moved around all day...banged...clanged...So they, we constantly find ourselves yelling everything we say. You haven't been told good morning till its been yelled at from down the tier!!

So i cut my beard and was going to the doctor or testing somewhere, when i had to come in contact with another idiot K9. The first thing he says (see, because of their position of authority, they all feel like they can talk to you in any manner they want. You're just a low life and plus they've got the power of the sate with all its weapons - legal and extra legal - and the immediacy of a trigger-happy sadistic idiot standing over your head with a mini 14 assault rifle locked and loaded). "Damn, you cut that beard Castlin? We were hoping you'd let it get long enough so we could give you the Abu Ghraib treatment and say you're one of those Muslim terrorists."

How do you respond to something like that? Mind you, you're standing there, butt-naked, doing the whole bend-and-cough b.s. How do you deal with that and the normal stresses of captivity? How, where do you find the strength to not reach thru the little 12 by 8 or whatever it is, slot in the cage door and try to pull his entire, fat body through?

What is it about some people that makes them feel they can say anything about other people to anyone? Or, rather, to someone whom they are familiar with? it completely boggles my mind. Why do people feel like they can use stereotypes, racist imagery and just plain ole stupidity about other people to anyone as long as the object of their ignorance isn't around? I hear and have to check it all the time from the stupid k-9s to the inmates, no matter what level of supposed consciousness or supposed authority they have. I had this one cop (k9) who was doing my legal mail one day, noticed the sender's address was frisco. This guy starts going off about homosexuals and how they are this and that...extremely ignorant stuff.

ignorant because for one it's mindless regurgitation of some other idiot's stereotypes. When or with whom a person, or how a person has sex - which is an act, a physical act, has not a thing to do with gender identity. Also, because you listen and you know this guy hasn't given any original thought to the point. They're basically parakeets with no home training. So i'm forced to put this guy into his pocket and let him know, "man, don't you realize you're talking to a Black man? Listen, spare me your brilliance - it's blinding - and just process my mail. It was sad because you can tell from the guy's wait and complexion the fact that he's perspiring just opening a letter that he cares nothing for himself and disparages others in order to, in the great amerikan class's democratic way, have someone to step on, to make himself feel better about his own shortcomings.

Blowin' Bubbles (a love poem!)

Your
I LOVE YOU
is;
a soapy slick
translucent bubble
blown by,
warm wind from
luring pouty lips
thru 3 rings of
a pink circus wand
dipped,
churned
in watery solutions,
floating limp.
a spend rocket
spiraling, crashes down
with an anticlimactic
empty thud
unable to dent
this newly
arctic heart!

"I watch the best minds not like dogs,
for scraps of flavour, I am nearing middle age,
burnt skin peels from my hand like paper,
onion-thin, like Peer Gynt's riddle"
-From "Codicil" by Derek Walcott

I love this passage. It's so true to my personal circumstance. How can i help them. Somebody please help me help these beautiful, strong, courageous Black men!!

Today i'm afraid of what this isolation, this constant, chest deep negativity is doing to me. Not physically, but more deeply - spiritually - mentally. i'm afraid my heart won't service my desire to be of use to someone other than myself. My love for people is slowly being chipped away along with my ability to confidently communicate. i've begun to notice in my conversation something i noticed about all the old guys whom i've met who've been caged back here for 10-20 years. There's a staccato stuttering, almost apprehensive cadence to their verbal communications. As if words are strangers and rocks that block your thoughts, so it's as if we're forcing them, pushing them out of our minds, our mouths, and they land with aloud thud, losing meaning in the noises, distraction.

I don't know if it comes from the fact that so much of the conversation is done in one's own head.

Just got back from yard. The fresh air was helpful. I like going out there best in the morning, while the air still has that chill to it. I can watch the sky break sometimes, if i'm lucky. It goes from a dark, almost purplish, blue to an ocean blue, then backyard swimming pool blue and finally a bright, warm, almost neon blue. In those times i always find myself standing there in the middle of the yard, neck bent to the point of pain, eyes focused with a fighter pilot's intensity, on the little space between the grill gate, or manhole cover, that runs the entire length of the yard, and the surveillance camera. In that 2 or 3 inches between the metal spikes for security, if you tweek your neck just right and squint your eyes, there's a spot you can see through with absolutely no obstructions and you get a clear view of the sky as far up as my eyes can take me.

I imagine swimming in that sky of oceanblue tranquility, floating away or i just let my eyes go as far as they can, for as long as my neck can take being in that position.

The unfortunate part, although i try not to think about it, is i always walk away feeling a bit sad - feeling a bit like the trap where they put a nut in a container with a small hole and then tempt the monkey to get the food out. He'll never be able to get his hand back out the hole with a balled fist, yet he's so hungry, so desperate for food, he won't let go. That's what it feels like. The sky is so beautiful up here. So peaceful and pure looking when everything around me is the exact opposite. How can i let it go? But at last i must. It's just another piece of beauty i'll never know!!

I dozed off for a few hours and had the strangest dream. In it there was myself and a bunch of other people. I can't say who any of them were in particular. You know how dreams tend to morph into other dreams?

The part i woke up thinking about was this: we were held up in a rickety old squatter building. Mattresses on the floor, clutter... There was a working telephone. I know because i remember having the feeling we were waiting for a specific call, so no one touched the phone. However i also remember you could sense we were all there waiting to do something righteous. The place was stacked from floor to ceiling with books, bags, papers, sleeping bags, clothes, food bags. Stuff scattered around from corner to corner and everybody was sitting around talking some really heavy stuff about when we get the call. We'd, or they'd - do this or that. This isn't something i actually remember hearing. It was more like a feeling you could feel it in the air. Thick like the smell of gasoline or burning wood.

So anyhow there was a small toilet-room - no bath, just an old rusty porcelain toilet, stained with old urine and who knows what else. It was overflowing so bad the water - foul smelling water - appeared to glow. A greenish brown glowing, foul-smelling liquid, or more like a thick slime, was spilling out and over the bowl, boiling up almost beginning to flood the room with all our supplies and sleeping bags, yet no one moved to stop it or move the supplies.

So myself and some old guy (i only remember he felt me with a snow white beard) trying to fix the problem. We're knee deep in this stench. it's in our pores and you can taste it almost! The dream was thick with disgust at this point!

So i have to go downstairs to get some type of plumbing supplies or a bucket or something from a man downstairs, who again felt like me. Only he was more like i am now, entering middle age and hopeful. I distinctly remember getting a sense from him that as soon as the call came he'd be the one who'd organize everyone. It's a weird feeling. We talked. i don't remember about what, exactly, but that was the vibe i got! i got the bucket from him and went back outside. the stairs had turned into these old wooden dilapidated stairs. They seemed to be falling way from the building and appeared to be 50 stories high. i tried to climb the first one, got to about the fifth, and they began to fall from under my feet. i slipped, the hand rail disappeared, and i tumbled and dropped to the ground.

Here's the trip. i saw the toxic slime drowning the people in the room, all of who seemed to now have these huge wings, and could've gotten out but wouldn't. They just lay there looking at me, calling and reaching out to me. Some had the slimy liquid coming out of their mouths. I remember feeling desperate and panicked. Some were still talking about when we get the call. I realized then i have wings too, why can't i fly to save them? Why don't they fly out?

I stood there trying to figure out how to use my wings. How do they work, why can't i fly? What's holding us back? I remember thinking we've got to go, the call ain't coming!

Then i woke up, feeling very uneasy, and i'm still feeling it with a hint of depression - from a dream. Is that crazy, or what? I keep thinking i let those people down in that room, because i didn't help them. i wasted my talents or gifts or something. My wings, when i had the chance, why didn't i fly to them? Then i get angry because they didn't save themselves either. We all were too busy waiting on some call or flapping our gums instead of our wings.

I think i'm gonna be depressed all day. i feel it. it always starts this way. I sink deeper, the more i think about it, but i can't stop thinking about it!

To pick up from where we left off, the question is; isn't it just as possible to project enough negative energy into the atmosphere, so that it would keep the world in a negative mindset, unable to move beyond a semi-comatose state, zombies, or drones, like worker bees in a hive? Could you keep enough war, famine, senseless t.v. programs and just plain ole lies being projected into people's lives that they unwittingly are programmed to act only on a very low, animalistic level? Just a thought. I'll have to clean it up and do some research. I know i'm not nowhere near the first ot think it. There's something to it!!

Man it's cold, cold, cold in here this morning! Of course there's cold recycled stale air blowing full-blast out the vent. here's a thought; sound waves which as we know are simply energy can be projected out to fill an entire arena, or any space for that matter and either positively or negatively affect those who hear the projected sound - like a wave or water soaks all it covers. Well, we know energy, sound, radio, micro, ultraviolet (light) rays have the power to change people's demeanor by acting on their vibratory rate, to the point of making them suicidal, depressed, gritty, happy and any other emotions (e = out motion = to move). The energy field in our bodies affects not only our psychological health but our physical health too! Gotta go, we'll talk tomorrow!