Auckland Poetry.com

“You’ve failed the writing” – you were told,
And you gave up. You quit.
I saw one more young talent fold,
And they just laughed at it.

If you are told life’s hard to play,
Your breath will still not cease.
How one should breathe, one cannot say,
As well as what to breathe.

You generated thoughts in rhymes,
The crowds wanted prose.
You know, they get harsh at times
From “truthful overdose”.

You proved yourself a zero, too -
A zero with a core.
And though your words are so damn true,
You’re nothing. Nothing more.

Execution

Ann had killed two men, for that she was fated to
die, there had been many appeals, they were in
vain; the governor too, not a man of much emotion,
had turned his manicured thumbs down.

Ann had been in our prison, five years now and had
become a friend and it was us, her keepers, whose
task it was to end her life, this woman who felt safe
in our jail, but she had brutally killed two men.

She asked us to be in the death room with her and
we spoke to her as she was injected with lethal drugs
and slipped away. A murderess that had killed her
father and brother, but refused to tell anyone why.

I was alone in the office when the phone rang,
the governor himself on the line, it was his birthday
and if it wasn’t too late her life could be spared.
“Too late? Ok! A killer, guess she deserved to die.”