Eastern State Penitentiary, Pennsylvania — Ghosts of Broken Men
by Dawg
Past midnight, the walls rise hungry, older than regret,
stones black with confessions the city tries to forget.
Eastern State stands unblinking, a mausoleum for rage,
cells stacked like lost years, bars like lines on a cage.
History bleeds through the mortar, soaked in each scream,
hope packed up and vanished–faith crushed by the machine.
You step through the archway, cold biting through your sleeve,
every corridor whispers “stay,” but even shadows want to leave.
Solitude sharpens in silence, madness bred in dust,
no mercy in the mortar, no god anyone could trust.
In every block, you feel the scratch of men who lost their names,
voices echo, laughter brittle, cursing judges, guards, and chains.
Faint light fractures on the walls, sharp as any knife,
hauntings spin their stories out of ruined, wasted life.
A cell door clicks for no one, a cough shudders down the hall,
you try to ignore the shadows, but the shadows know it all.
Somewhere in the cold, a name is scratched in stone,
a prayer for lost forgiveness, a plea to die alone.
You trace the letters, sense the bite of the nail,
history wears no bandage; every scar tells the tale.
The cellblock air is poison, thick with dust and moan,
despair is its religion; you will worship here alone.
Chains rattle in the vent shafts, unseen fingers brush your skin,
sanity grows brittle, as if cracked from deep within.
Step deeper in the darkness, where the hope bled dry,
see the lines of broken men who learned how not to cry.
Every footstep is a verdict, every echo is a threat,
you are walking with the failures the world won’t let forget.
Men carved out by punishment, whittled down to skin and bone,
every life erased behind a door of steel and stone.
Here, suffering lingers–the voices, the stench, the stains,
a prison built for bodies that would never break their chains.
Eastern State remembers every soul it crushed or kept–
ghosts of broken men are all that’s left.