Angelo Sedillo is a (De)serving Life client serving life at NENMCF in Clayton, NM. Angelo is a member of a group of peers at Clayton focused on positivity, mutual support, and accountability in their journey towards parole and eventual freedom. Through his poems, Angelo describes the realities of life in prison and explores the emotions he’s feeling while serving life for a murder he committed as a child. Angelo hopes to connect with and provide understanding to those interested in hearing the hard truths about serving life. He also hopes his words provide support and empathy to anyone out there impacted by mass incarceration and who needs to heal.
From a collection called “Wringing Out Metaphor in November”
Lines Of Memory Come with Sting
When you recall your past
Of weathered memories your hands
Have hidden
Or retired to some giant
Granite entombment
Too old for any one to remember
P A I N
Is what brought it all home
Centering your humanness
On FEEL
While recording your sights
As the proof
That there is no living
Without the beat of the Hurt
– So document your story.
-Angelo Sedillo
From a collection called: “The Life Series: Life is A Prisoner in Cell 203”
The Thing that Drives the Spirit
Morning smiles unknowing
That I am trying to hold
It together
While feigning boldness
Fragility peeks to unravel
Me to emotionally gutted
And I am the container
Whose pourings drown possibility
And each new day
An Era of oppression begins
As brown body’s ransom
Sloggers me through burying bravery
Inside the receptacle filled to brim
But each new day
A swelling confidence
Under second chances mercy
Propels me forward
Past powerlessness,
Count sheets,
And self an abnegation That cowardice brings-
Hope, not courage,
Empowers me to engage.
-Angelo Sedillo
From a collection of sonnets called: “Sonnets to the Shackle”
His
His ankles were callous, legs of bark that supported his travels
Over razored yards of prison, he traversed. There, the winds breath smelled of freedom,
Everything else…monastic…beehivishly fast, rash, with desperate
Plans of motion reeling toward the gate. The fences choked his vision
Strangling like garrote, all possibility holed up in his ambition
Deposit. He walked none-the-less. He walked with a rubber and ball of nerves,
Paying little attention to the static mumbles of his heart-
When the prison was set to explode…
He walked just to let his court line sneakers gulp up the gravel.
The winds breath smelled of freedom he, had none
That existed outside of his mind.
And when the prison, scorched in its crimson coat of shanks,
He pondered the color of concrete, till it was his bones
Once the bedlam came alive, he pulled out pen & pad to leave record of his travels.
-Angelo Sedillo