Never Let the Monster Inside Take Control
A drawing from inside.
This section publishes creative contributions mostly from currently and formerly incarcerated people. It includes short-stories, poetry, creative nonfiction, art, and much more.
If you have something creative to submit to us, we would love to read it, or see it, and publish it in About Time – please write to us!

A drawing from inside.
Cold blows the wind tonight, sweetheart, cold are the drops of rain, cold are the four walls of my cell, so cold I shall remain.
These “emotions” that carry me. It’s from these that you see me. Let not what you see, be all I can be. I’m so much more, this isn’t all.
A girl trying to find her soul, an escape with rope and toe up a tree, a knot a swing.
No mail, no bail, just jail. Hail and rain, rain and suffering, silently ingrained.
Shout out to all you maintenance workers, from painting to plumbing, youse know you’re the reasons these places don’t collapse in on us!
In Creative Learning we get to see some amazing stuff made by talented people. The best part is hearing the stories behind how creative projects have come to life.

Buy-Ups feed my belly, but what about my mind? Wth nothing on the telly, I might as well be blind.

It was November 2025. I had zero dollars in my jail account. Mum sent me some Christmas dollars. I’d just started working and was earning $47.00 per week, plus $9.95 hygiene allowance.

He awoke, annoyed, just able to make out his cellie in the blacked-out gloom. He began to protest, but his spirit soared when he heard the word: “Your library books are here!”

I hated the kitchen on the outside but have learnt from being inside that it makes me feel wholesome and happy.

“I recognise that”, “that’s someone I know”, “I can’t place who, but that is someone’s smell”.

There’s irony, hypocrisy, fallacy, a vast ocean of distance to cross. The “saint”, the “sinner”, it’s lunacy, that the ignorant could save the lost.

I’m not belle of the ball, not the very least, but we have something in common, I’m in love with a beast. But the beast is not a person but a drug that I call meth, I’ve been talking to myself for hours, I’m running out of breath.

Nostalgia is a gentle haze, a soft and fading, golden maze, where time itself begins to blur, and memory’s touch is sweet and pure.


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