James Mclain Poet Free verse

62 percent of all floridians oppose the death penalty

the numbers come in
62 percent say no—
no to the chair,
no to the needle,
no to suffocation,
by use of nitrogen gass,
no to the quiet hum of the state’s revenge.

but these governors 
dont believe in your god
or any afterlife,
they just believe in power
and the hard steel of punishment.

they say killers of children
are beasts—
but beasts are born of something broken,
a twisted wire
in the brain’s dark room.
and yet, they drag
the quiet schizophrenic,
the dreamer with the soft eyes,
into the same cage
and call him or her dangerous too.

justice
wears a crooked badge,
and if you say
you weren’t harmed,
if you whisper
you did nothing,
they still twist your words,
stack the deck,
smile through jury tampering
like it’s just another game
at the courthouse bar.

two weeks to save your life—
that’s all they give you.
fourteen days
to read a lifetime of law
and stand against a machine
that eats the poor and the lost.

62 percent say no,
but the machine keeps running—
a blind god
that never hears
the prayers of the condemned. 

should our children have to witness--
these executions,
claiming some form of deterrent, 
as they did in the 19th century.

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