The other old men and I never thought our lives would come to this. But here we gather again, like withered autumn leaves, awaiting the 7 am call for muster. Occasionally we stare at the large blank television screen which has been positioned high up in a corner of our small common room. What are we looking for? Maybe, we are awaiting yet another rerun of our broken lives to appear, as they so often do in our mind’s eye. But, mostly, we just sit in silent regret, staring ahead.

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Our minds are far away.

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By 6.30 am, eight of us share the dim light in the common room: three sit on hard, flesh-coloured plastic dining chairs around an empty circular table, and five of us squeeze together seated on bright-blue and yellow sofas whose torn vinyl covers have seen better days.

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But our minds are far away.

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The only sound belongs to the tiny, sharp claws grappling with the meshed security screen affixed to our open kitchenette window. Beyond lies the grassy exercise yard criss-crossed by narrow concrete paths. The rosellas have returned with the dawn, in all their blue and red-feathered freedom, for their early morning fix of fresh white bread smeared with strawberry jam. Richard, an elderly inmate we fondly call ‘the birdman’, pokes a few sweet fragments of bread through small diamond-shaped apertures in the metallic meshwork. The rosellas quickly move into position to gorge themselves. Richard offers a fleeting moment of connection, a crumb of kindness tossed through the barrier that separates us from the world beyond.

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But our minds are far away.

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Here in our cage, on the inside, we sit in a sleepy trance, cushioned against the sordid outside world of daily prison life. We take comfort to remain cocooned cosily in that twilight state of awakening, unwilling or unable to permit our well-dressed dreams entry into the starkness of the now.

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Sunlight begins to filter gently, softly, into our gloom, revealing the shadowy outlines of our dark lives. But, in the partial light, we cannot easily distinguish dreams from reality, pleasure from pain, nor life from death.

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Our minds are far away.

This is our time of morning communion when no-one speaks; to do so would be irreverent, would desecrate the sacred silence which we share, and upon which we feed. Instead, we sit and stare into the still-cool morning air while slowly sipping sweet, insipid coffee from our bright-red melamine mugs.

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Our thoughts, memories, and desires are like fragments of bleached confetti, now scattered into dark and secret places, hidden beyond our knowing. Strewn over bygone days, our former lives have shrivelled beneath skies that once seemed so sure, so vast, so cloudless, and so intensely cobalt blue.

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Yes, our minds are far away.

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Regret is the bitter pill we swallow with every sunrise. It clings closely to our hearts.

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We mourn the paths not taken, the bridges burned, the dreams left to gather dust. We are old men now, our time for redemption slips through our hands like grains of sand.

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Yet, a flicker of hope remains, a fragile ember we hold onto in the darkness. The dream of freedom, of starting anew, of weaving a new tapestry, not of regret, but of a life finally lived.

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Until then, we are here in our cage, bound to the past but imaging a future bathed in the soft light of a new beginning.

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Our minds are far away.

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“But there is within me that shall tire Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire”

– Byron