The Execution Date

Thus, I lay waiting

Cold dreary halls, agonized by tomorrow’s coming

Metal clinks and jangles, shadows stay and whisper

Consuming and bearing, clipped angel wings bleeding, left by hell’s gatekeeper

I can never forget the day of my reckoning

When heartless voices and granite faces announced my ending

Soulless eyes: months upon months of seated planning

Never mind the ongoing funeral march playing

In my head, I am but a robot, mechanically existing

Waiting for torments upon torments to end

For sheer mistakes I can never mend

Mistakes that make us all men

Impassioned mistakes that shape fate’s wrinkled hand

Drawing upon my restless heart

Gray floors, gray walls, metal bars willingly impart

Secrets of tomorrow

Of which I can no longer spend in this cell box, I can only borrow

A few mere seconds time mockingly dangles by my agonized face

Years of captivity and brutal self-examination I can never replace

For who is the murderer and who is the victim?

The lines blur slowly as I approach black hallways echoing

Catcalls of society for humane killings

Are we not all sinners? Suffering under the fatalities of human conscience…

So, shall I lie waiting? Growing darkness becomes grim, this hostility makes no sense

My hands strapped by leather bounds, I see an audience observing

This sentence planned out, my requiem’s beginning

White sheets will be stained by blood unseen

My blood on the hands of the two-faced harbinger of justice: this is just a routine

For justice to be served by faulty men serving

Two lives have to part and travel the early dawn’s awning

The dead and the killer, yet both of them victims

And God’s grace of life will be nothing more than another controversial saying

An eye for an eye, the world into blindness eternally descending

And I will be nothing more than a hot topic of debate

For no one cares whether I live or die, such stained human hands are treated with hate

Therefore I shall never experience mercy in this life

And I walk the path the never ends, apologies to continuing strife.

(A/N: we were assigned debate topics and our (my partner and I) assignment was con: the death penalty. After the debate, we were to make a poem about our topic wherein we would put ourselves in the shoes of someone affected by our topic. This is my poem.