Five Years Ago Today -

Tonight (In Memory of Stanley “Tookie” Williams)

Today is Monday, December
Twelfth, 2005
7 p.m.
And in five hours
Several wishes will die
My fingers uncrossed long
Ago, after America waited
For a Hollywood republican to terminate
A sentence
And encore as a hero
One more time
On account of peace
But when we pieced
Shit together
We miscounted the politics
That doesn’t give a damn
About a man’s integrity
When faulty judgments render him guilty
Now I sit up praying
For Tookie
Weeping for all men
Because these types of things are never
Isolated
This struggle is a course we all share
And Tookie isn’t eating his last meal
Alone tonight
Pieces of us are dying with him
And justice is being lethally injected
With bullshit rhetoric
About responsibility
And it’s easy to scream “FUCK ARNOLD”
Waving my middle finger
Toward a falling sun
But two suns will set in the west tonight
And it would have taken more
Than a John Hancock to stop what’s become second nature
The blood of my brothers soaks this soil
And this poem will be the same tomorrow
And this poem will be the same the day after
And this poem will be the same the day after

from [If] Life's Rotten, Write to the Core