A Poem for a Teacher

I loved you, prison guard.
I know you loved me.

I had no choice and no escape
from the cinder block walls
for an eternity of those bright
adolescent hours that should
have been all mine to have
and to hold for better or worse
and spend in brilliant bursts
of godlike play that could
have only made it better.

But in that dreary prison place,
I felt that I had yet escaped
from some even darker, more
sickly and sorrowful hole,
and that you, my prison guard,
were at least some fashion of
a mother to me.