Best Judicial System Poems

the air reeks of stale coffee and ink-stamped lies,
judges sit like smug kings,
smirking over lives they'll never live,
dismissing truth with a gavel's cough.

innocent men shuffle like cattle,
faces drawn, hands calloused from the grind—
plead guilty or rot waiting.
'justice, ' they call it,
while the lawyers get fat...

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I could not do what you are mandated to do
every day on society's justice bench,
weighing retributive justice 
against restorative healing.

I cannot look with any comfort
at police
and correction officers'
routinely criminalizing vocations,
and courtroom injudicious levying of fines
against the young
and black
and brown
and homeless

Punishing prison sentences
for the most obvious...

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