Those who are run our prisons are bad people and will return.
Radio talk-back personality, 1992
You spent your adolescence
going feral in the dank dormitories
dodging warders' pricks
their suckered arms
a thousand greedy mouths
the Golden Fleece evaded you
down the stairs watched you crumple
a first-aid dummy leaking air
your story's hardly new round here
the mother drunk father never there
at twelve you were stealing bread
to feed a younger brother
(how the other half do live)
the usual odyssey years spent echoing
through boys' homes courts cells
heard it all before
and Ken's dour warning "Have you noticed
how 95% of these guys
are wrongfully convicted?"
it still clutches this Chinese Palm
curved thorns that won't let go
our white-haired boy re-set gem
you'd strutted your model-student stuff
for half the year (9/10 for Attitude
and Self-esteem) cleaned up now
and clearing out
you're the Education Officer's
favourite made-over man
feel-good client of the year
coming in from a work-out
you sweep the dusk to one side
sweating and the muscles
under your regulation singlet
strike gold blue eyes chip light
you're sure this time
to break the circuit
you show us photos girlfriend/toddler/baby
eager to kick-start a new life
behind them Housing Commission high-rise
beckons with clammy floors
cisterns shuddering through walls at night
and the anti-aircraft flak
of voices raised in anger
no more dirty needles no more graft
this time it's the yellow brick road
out of here the bush as salvation
your own very hill of gold – like Streeton's where even the wind
seemed sunburnt
the earth rolled out in copper grassland
for the rug-rats on and on
to the tip of the horizon
9 p.m. in the prison library
and we can taste the rain
you're dancing to us after drought
five months later someone says he saw you
in the street staggering high on smack
we sit around the table listening
to the sound of gates closing in the rain