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We never used the guillotine
And it shows.
Power here has forgotten
It is housed in meat.
It sleeps in marble,
Dreaming itself weather
A pressure system without a brain,
A storm bottled in a badge
like a champagne of hatred.
Then Lorenzo drives toward morning,
Thirty-five years folded behind him
Like blueprints in a glove box,
And the state mistakes his windshield
For an advancing century.
Johan turns a wheel in Maine.
His wife, his child,
The brief republic of their love
Gathered beside him.
They were not the men it wanted.
Yet they are dead.
ICE bullet finds this distinction
Academic.
Brown becomes a quantum offense:
Moving is resisting.
Existing is resisting.
Breathing transforms the waveform
Into probable cause.
Present and already absent,
Alive until observed
Through the black soul
Of the government eye.
A woman carries Pampers
Soft moons for a small body,
Cotton promises against
The ordinary flood
And there a weapon concludes
The child has asked too much of life.
Protest, and fifty years descend,
A stone calendar imprisoned
Mortared around the word terror.
The French laid consequences
In the square
Where rulers could hear
The blade practicing gravity,
The crowd cheering the fall,
The head becoming an object
With somewhere else to go.
We built no such instrument.
Only doors locking inward,
Black vehicles, white faces,
Ku Klux hoods laundered
Into uniforms and statutes,
And laws that stare upward
So they never have to see
The piles of innocents
Gathered at their feet through
Execution.
I do not praise the cutting,
But the vanished knowledge
That every empire, however abstract,
Has a neck hidden somewhere
Inside its own body
And there’s no hiding it
When the people wants
its power back.
Thank you for reading my work, !
Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself!
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If you liked this poem, you might also like:
Impotent in Chief
These posts stay free because I don’t believe good writing should live behind a velvet rope.
The New Species - Voiceover
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That's beautiful, thank you. Did you know that the put on puppet shows with the beheaded corpses during the French Revolution, using their bodies like marionettes? So macabre. The scene of Anne Boleyn's beheading in the BBC series of ‘Wolf Hall’ and the subsequent books still haunts me. It was so brutal but had a moment of tenderness that made it all the more horrifying: the executioner makes a noise to make the blindfolded Anne look to one side, tip-toes to the other and swings. Aristocracy had merciful deaths, beheading by sword. The more normal blunt axe often took half a dozen chops. The guillotine was quick, unerring and merciful. You'd remain conscious for a few seconds, but hanging? Before hangmen measured and weighed their victims to make sure they broke their necks it was the most agonizing and undignified death. Victims often ejaculated, a last desperate attempt to spread their seed. It's so brutal and ugly and vicious. We might think we live in ugly and horrible times, but it's nothing compared to how cruel we were in the 16ᵗʰ century. People used to watch executive for entertainment, still did at Tyburn into last century. Public executive became rarer, but WTF? How could anyone take pleasure in another's painful death? Justice? There but for the grace of God? I don't buy any of it.
There is no limit to the depravity, cruelty and barbarity we can imagine and, worse, enact, but there's also no limit to the beauty we can invent. We've come a long, long way, maybe not far enough, but we are going in the right direction.
THANK YOU! You are saying the same message I have been screaming about for many years, Nicole.
The corruption and stark inequality is coming to a head in America. The people have to WAKE UP soon, or we peasants will have no choice but to take our revenge.
The Oli's and their lackeys are past their limits.
The Constitution specifies the death penalty in cases of TREASON!