Death Row
Jan 16 2015


Death row
is a long corridor
of windowless cells.
Where bright fluorescents buzz,
white light
on pale skin
starved of sun.
And hard concrete blocks
echo every sound,
so the noise is loud, and constant.

Which is hard,
since all the men on it
are innocent,
convicted in a court of law
but not, apparently, the eye of God.
Or so they swear,
up to the final prayer
and intravenous.

Such solitude
would drive a man insane.
A tiny room
in the shape of a coffin.
The absence of touch
with no one to talk to.
And a last meal, tasting of straw
you swallow dry.

How would it feel

to know the day you will die

down to the second?

To focus the mind
on what comes next,

if anything.

To grieve your own death,

because for you

it's no longer hypothetical.

To spend what time is left
contending with evil, redemption, regret,
seeking forgiveness
or to simply forget.

The killer, pacing
his victim at rest.
How ironic
to mourn the shortness of time
while so sorely oppressed
by its glacial passage.

Eye for eye, and leg for leg,
the symmetry of vengeance
finality of death.
This is Old Testament justice
on our behalf,
the taking of life
the cruelty of chance.

Which makes us all complicit
in the execution
of an innocent man.

I watched a deeply affecting 6-part series (on Sundance) called Rectify. It was about a man released into a largely hostile community after 20 years on death row. Institutionalized at the age of 18, he is the living dead, struggling to adjust to life on the outside. I found two things about this drama especially brilliant and brave. First, how low-key and slowly paced it was: instead of going for sensationalism and melodrama, it was this naturalism and authenticity that gave the series its power. And second, that the issue of guilt was never fully resolved. At the start, I reflexively identified with the supportive sister and the wronged man, falsely convicted and coerced to confess. But as the piece went on, I felt myself whip-sawed with doubt. The ending is inconclusive. Nothing is really resolved. Which is not only a lot more like real life than television, it's why Rectify sticks with you for days and weeks.

This is the same way a good short story works. It drops in and out of a moment in time, so you have the sense of what went on before, and of life after. Which is very unlike a novel, which contains it’s own complete world, and which leaves no loose ends.

So I guess that's why death row came to mind. Although it's not really the sort of poem I like to write, veering too close to advocacy, politics, agit-prop. Especially since I go back and forth on the death penalty, while the poem isn't nearly so ambivalent.