Eyes Wide Open

Little girls and boys
with once gleaming faces
who looked to the world
with eyes wide open.

Locked up in cells
with older men,
with dirty men,
with dirt walls.

Somewhere,
someone miscalculated
and decided that a cubic room
four meters by
four meters
accommodates
eighteen people.

A tin can shitter
sits in the corner.
A tin can
if you’re lucky.

Cold spaghetti in
dirty shopping bags
for dinner again
and again...

Locked up for years
from a world of closed ears
and eyes focused
on lesser, material things.

Locked up
and beaten and molested,
for theft,
for smoking,
or for nothing at all.
Judge and jury nonexistent,
the executioner:
time.

And still they sit,
now,
still they cry
with salty tears
that will never be seen,
still they look,
out of hellish cells
through hellish bars
at a world
that has forgotten them
and their constant nightmares.

Still,
with emotions that have
lost their meaning,
with fears that consume them,
without faith,
without friends,
without the basic fundamentals
of a human life.
Still they sit,
still they wait,
bearing pains that no one
should ever feel.
Still they are there
staring at the dark sky.

With eyes wide open.