Nerve 24 - Prison Space

Prison Space

By Rob Saven
Image 'Serenity in a Cell' by MIG

As I sit here on my own gazing starwards and watching a big full moon I think to myself this 12 x 6 cell is my safe place. I am at risk outside that steel door, danger lurks round every corner and enemies plot to put me in a 6 foot box 6 feet under, and I don't like spaces that small. I think it is called failurephobia or is it coffinconfinephobia. Anyway no-one looks forward to our final resting 'place'.

So now lets look at some nice warm campfires and lovers and prams and boats, planes, trains and going insane.

We all have a warm space we feel safe in, protected from the rains and pains of everyday life. We have a name for this place of space = home.

So a major perspective of a concept of space is that from the moment we are conceived we have our own special personal space, but once we leave the safety of the womb, spaces start to have prices to pay and dangers to consider. My very personal space was my crib and a silver cross pram. I guess my mother never left me out of her own personal space, then when I was safe and sound in my cot she could crack on with her and her husband's space on a sofa with a black and white TV and a nice big roaring fire.

For a few years the safe streets of Old Swan were ours and as we grew older and bolder, our boundaries expanded until we owned passports, and then the world's your space to choose where you wanna call home.

But I guess the space I would really like to talk about is the space inside me. I could go on about gutters and bin sheds and prison bunks but I reckon that hole, that space we all try to fill, it's a specific shape and we all have needs and wants to try to find happiness, contentmentville and we create a safe world around us as we all sthrive for space to be firstly safe, then maybe nice to the eye or at least pleasing. So, useful places, like where we work and play and some place for our kids to feel safe.

Do all placements or space have real or kind or evil faces? Who knows but you what your space is.

Today my safe space is sitting here in a 6 x 12 concrete tomb. I live my life watching from a safe distance at life passing me by every morning at 5amish. I rise from a hard metal tray Serco called a bunk and put the kettle on and breathe. I feel safe and sound (The SAS) until they invade my personal space and unlock the cell door.

Don't forget my philosophy, they aren't locking me in, they are locking themselves out!!! This is my space, that is theirs!

The spaces in prison, the workshops and education, the landings and cells and the spaces between the lines - fill in those maybe or the space between my ears, the darkness I have always hid in or the space in my heart, the nowhere to run boy, the death within the living or the space in my bed where once my love did lay. Now I fill that space with a pillow.

Or what about the spaces I dream about - the golden sands, the miles and miles of virgin soil, the great open spaces or even the space on a strait jacket, the dumb restrictions of strip cells, the bare walls and empty space, or space as a place in time we all want to visit.

Talk about space on the streets, the car parks we call roads, the greenbelt, the oceans, the wilderness, but most of all the sky. It's the limit (or is it)?

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