My name is Larry Rush, aka, Leroy "Slim" Thomas. My podium is a small, concrete, double-barred, narrow, concealed window cell. I am buried alive. Literally! I claw against the walls of my coffin until my nails bleed.

In the darkness my moans are no longer controllable and, in the breach of security, I'm forced to listen to my cries and its echoes. The effects are psychologically dismantling.

Whatever pillar of strength you manage to smuggle inside the walls and confines of DEATH ROW will inevitably crumble. Then you realize what a hot commodity sanity has become. It's scarce and infrequent.

I personally watched sanity divorce its reasoner. Only to have a man I befriended stare at me blankly without recognition. As if the fire of his very essence had been extinguished.

My God!

The need for fellowship is a necessary - Bible, Koran, a book on philosophy, novel, (fiction/nonfiction) newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, a lovely card, a letter, a phone conversation, or a visit from a family member or friend can mean the different between the life and death of a person's inner spirit; it's survival of the personal self.

Whatever judicial vehicle used to transport you here, whether it was an innocent wrongfully convicted, or the guilty pleading to such, the DEATH PENALTY and its housing pods are unconscionable horrific. It's remarkable in the extreme. Your arrival will result in your disconnection from anything vital. Intimate relationship with family and loved ones will become inconsiderable. Visitations are privileged and impersonal. You'll starve for intellectual stimulation and contract the disease diagnosed as "physical deterioration".

I suffer from frequent episodes of claustrophobia. I am suffocating in here. I don't want to be killed. Tell death to stop lying in wait for me! It's willfully and deliberately premeditating to end my life. It's waiting and wishing that I exhaust all of my appeals so it could appear at my cell door with a death warrant from the governor.

I close my eyes and hope that if I don't see its face, maybe it'll leave me alone. Not too many people walk away from DEATH ROW. It's adamant in its slaughter.

But still my belongings are neatly packed away. Somehow I will escape its clutches! I'm one appeal away from exoneration. If one day you see me and I'm still in shackles, I beg of you, let me be. Do not interfere in what you do not understand. What if they forget to uncuff me?

Maybe they left them on to use me as a deterrent to those around me? The anguish and torment this place has inflicted upon me is indelible. I'm incessantly handcuffed to its tragedies and un-riddable memories of the executions and those executed and how close I came to being liquidated. If indeed I am truly spared.

I AM - LARRY