I grew up in a tuff- neighborhood. My elementary school in the Bronx was nicknamed "The School of Broken Dreams." At the tender age of nine, I made a zip gun so I could shoot a rival nine-year-old gang member.

My dad knew our neighborhood was bad news, and he tried to get us out, but life kept pulling us back. Even when we lived for a time in North Carolina, the New York thug life was still in my veins. My high school English teacher-a gentle Southern lady-caught me writing on scrap paper and read aloud to the class the thoughts that were burning me up inside: "Your homies are pushing time, dope, or daisies." What did it mean, she wanted to know. How could I possibly explain?

It meant my whole life had been poisoned by the hell I called home. It meant my normal was someone else's nightmare. It meant that even though I moved back to the same block in the Bronx time and again, by the time I reached adulthood, I'd never again see any of the kids from "The School of Broken Dreams." They disappeared, one at a time, pushing time in prison, pushing dope on the streets, or pushing daisies long before they should've been.

That English teacher told me to write my story. Write down the words that poured out of my pain. Maybe someday, she said, some young man will read those words and have a better life. Two years later, standing in the yard of the world's largest prison, I remembered her words. And I began writing. I never stopped.

Now, decades later, the book she inspired me to write is in print. These poems are my introduction to myself. They are the words I've spent 40 years pouring onto bluebooks in school and scraps of paper in prison, on notepads and napkins or whatever I had handy. They're the words I used to express a life I could never hope to explain otherwise. I have stood in the yard of the world's largest prison. I have been captive to drugs, depression, demons, gangs, the state, and even the Devil himself.

But I am a captive no longer.