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I wouldn’t have run.
I’d take my lumps like a man with a busted lip and no lawyer.
I stood there in front of a judge who smelled like cologne and paperwork,
reciting lines from a script written by cowards,
asking questions designed to turn blood into ink.
They call it a process.
That’s what they always call a cage before the door shuts.
I agreed to walk in, hand myself over,
sign my name at the edge of a cliff
and pretend it was a bridge.
They took me right then.
Belt. Shoes. Dignity.
Stripped down in a room full of people who pretended not to look.
That’s how fast you go from citizen to property,
from man to inventory.
The sentence came a year later,
but by then it was just paperwork for a corpse.
You lose everything in the first five minutes —
the chains are just decoration,
the number just a souvenir.
And you stand there wondering
when the fairy tale broke.
When the flag turned into a receipt.
When freedom became a rumor.
And when the hell you agreed to become a thing.
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