This is a persona poem I wrote from the point of view of a man being executed for blowing up an abortion clinic.

EXECUTION

Twelve years locked alone in the hole has come to this,
lying on a deathbed of vengeance
with the spotlight sucking sweat from my pores.

The peanut gallery is filled with voyeurs.
Doctors, nurses, clinic staff,
and the families of the slaughtered stare
from their front row seats to my execution.
If their eyes were bullets, I'd already be dead.

IVs dripping liquid death
puncture my veins.
They will soon deliver the sentence
handed down by the American holocaust,
the judicial system murdering those
with conflicting views that are outside of their box.

They ask if I have any last words,
but I have none.
My crime spoke for me.
The babies were going to die anyway,
no harm no foul.
I was just…speeding up the process.
At least I'm not playing God,
deciding who lives and who dies.
I was only living out his beliefs,
His words, His gospel.
Just think of me as an apostle with a pipe bomb.

But how this society can justify the crimes of one
and condemn another puzzles me.
I see no doctors behind these bars,
no mothers of the fetuses
left to suffer in these damp jail cells.
Yet they are free of the persecution,
but not me.
not my beliefs; not my way of killing.
Now it's my turn to die, and

it feels so close, so close
that I can feel it, so close,
it flows through my veins, so close
it rushing through my body,

yet I am not afraid.
I have no fear of what lies on the other side of the pearly gates.
I have only done God's work, obeyed His word,
just in a way that showed that I meant business,
that I took no prisoners,
that I could not be stopped.
I know my work was justified,
and once I die,
I will be with my Maker.