If 60 convicts can save a puppy from a sewage drain
In the rain, in chains
The DA breathing down their necks,
And you can find a reason to break cake
In a TV funhouse where cheese mutates to bread
And you can remember being there 11 years earlier,
Feeding lemons to your daughter
To negotiate the slaughter of whatever protests she might have made
And it doesn’t make the ground beneath you shake
And it doesn’t make you die a thousand times,
For every smile you might have missed
For every cheek that wasn’t pinched
If you can warn the airline clerks about the men with shaved arms and chests
Or stand like Gandolf at the security gate, screaming,
You shall not pass,
If you can deliver a clemency sentence 10 seconds
Before the poison gas
To a man who deserves to burn
Then surely you can escape the internal death row
You call home and for which you have condemned yourself.
— Erin Passons, 9-2015
