I'm just going to read, probably,
a couple more from here.
The boarding school was in a place where most of us
were separated from our families for months at a time,
and if your parents had a car, they could get in to see you,
and they would come and visit you on the weekend.
Or you could go home for the regular school breaks.
Fortunately, my parents would come and visit me once a month,
driving from the reservation, check us out, as we called it.
And we'd spend the weekend with them.
Then suddenly we had to go back to the boarding school.
The first poem that I wrote about the boarding school
was this poem called "No Parole Today."
At the time, I was a student at the University
of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and the assignment
was to read, to write a poem about prison.
And I connected that to living alone, living in the boarding
school for a number of years, because our lives, really, were
very regulated and regimented.
We couldn't come and go as we pleased
because it was a large campus.
And so we had to be kept track of all the time.
So this poem was actually--
This first poem, "No Parole Today,"
started all of this about boarding schools.
"No Parole Today."
In 1980, prisoners rioted in the Santa Fe State Prison.
After several days of violence and bloodshed,
the prison was retaken by the authorities.
A shadow of smoke passed over my dreams.
I awoke, tried to remember what was
said about Santa Fe and prison, the blood and emotions
spilling over.
I dressed and poured a cup of coffee.
Then I remembered my own scars, lying on bunk beds
and listening to floor polishers swirling, and the bell that
drove me to sneaking behind cars and freeways.
I swore, then, I would never scrub no more walls and porches
at midnight, not for the woman who sits sideways in auditorium
chairs and steals bacon from the back
door as easily as she could steal your confidence.
I'm not from here.
No more rubber meat and showering on cement floors.
I learned early that my life was separated by walls and roll
calls.
Last night, they said, 1,000 men uncapped themselves
behind barbed wire and smoke.