“A Lifetime Of Regrets”

Onyx – All We Got is Us

I just got out two months ago from serving time and if I could do it all over again, I would do everything completely different.

I could never get that time back now. 23 plus years in that damn place. I’m 43 now and sometimes I don’t know where I am sometimes. The world has changed so much.

I got popped in 1983 for an armed robbery that turned nasty. I didn’t mean to murder the guy. But he pulled his weapon on me when all I wanted was the cash that he made for the day. It was a knee jerk reaction, now I was put in a situation that I didn’t anticipate. He owned the convenience store and was within his right to defend himself.

23 years.

All I wanted was some extra money to take this chick out that I had been trying to talk to. She finally gave in to going out to catch a flick with me but I didn’t have a job. I was hyper and dying to get the pussy, nobody around the way ever did….and I damn wasn’t about to miss out on the neighborhood’s finest chick.

After I was locked up, she never even wrote me. My home boys on the outs said that she never even asked for me. That’s fucked up. She’s a crackhead now I heard, full of AIDS and suckin’ strange dicks for five dollars a pop. Now she wants to holler at me, ain’t life messed up sometime?

If I had the focus to get a job and stop hanging out with the fools I was with I could have taken her out and maybe BOTH of our lives could have been so different….but when you are young and stupid you don’t want to hear anything!

I lost my mother and couldn’t be there for her last days on this earth. My younger sisters and brothers are doing so well and are grown up now with their own families. They truly reach out to me but I can’t stand to be around them even though I love them so much because their success reminds me of what I could have done with my life. The most productive years of my life….GONE!

Staying in school doesn’t seem so bad now if only I have known what I know now back then. Where will I get a job now?

Credit?

What’s that?

I am living off welfare now and that is going to run out soon. What woman would want me? What do I have to offer? I can’t understand how these young brothers want to glorify what we call the “Thug Life” and they act as though it’s trophy to get arrested, have a record and do time. Like a tagged pigeon, that shit follows you for the rest of your life and NEVER goes away!

CONVICT.

No matter what else good in this life you do, that’s all many will see. And these videos on television turn my stomach! Twisting our minds and encouraging us to kill each other over “BLING” “BITCHES” and “PAPER”. Half of these little young niggaz don’t even know that they will be somebodies bitch when they go upstate, getting pimped and having to work the musty showers on your knees for some funky man’s pleasure so someone ELSE can have extra cigarettes!

Then when they get out and act all hard they forget to tell you THAT part. All I wish now is if I had a nice job, a nice home and ONE woman that I could be faithful to in marriage….but all I have now is broken dreams, lost time and a lifetime of regrets……

…….a very introspective Duane Robinson, 43, reflects on his life and what might have been if he didn’t make the bad choices that forced him to live 23 plus years of his life at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, Maryland.