Anatomy Of A Suicide Poem by Alto Lee Thomas, Jr.

Our full-flowered, favored life has rotted into this.
Seems hope exhaled from hollowed hearts, inhales with emptiness
Empathy eludes the child whose dreams are not redeemed.
Lacking eyes that sympathize, exacerbates the theme

A guiltless man lends twenty years entombed in death row's cage
As justice's debt comes ripened; Injustice pays the wage;
Would a mother long regret the love she sells to pay the rent?
Are our souls purged pure of shame for Auschwitz's innocents?

Weaned freely from sobriety, we share syringes and ourselves
Black tar paves waves through veins and brains - redacting relevance
The clock portends you cannot win with every tick and stroke.
So we feign to seek forgiveness for the gentler hearts we broke

The quill is filled with consequence to scrawl our fate upon the page
Chained below we strain to tow, our traps, our guilt, - our rage
In the end the fight for life survives,
To crush the thoughts of suicide.