Perfect Execution Poem by Fleance Candide

There -
The place where he once stood
As a shadow of a ghost
Grinning under a hangman’s hood.

- Where he shared a joke with a friend
Consoling the condemned,
- Where the smoke from his peppery pipe
Filled the sky with laughter,
- Where souls drifted on dark raven’s wings
And tears gurgled in the air

To a cracked chorus of belching
Breathing life in the ears of the damned.
Peppercorn smoke stinging the
Gaunt-eyes of the gallows -
Buildings burned, fields lie fallow
Haunts are hallowed - Taunted
When he played his pipe of pepper.
But the spicy smoke is long gone
Replaced by the mist from a dragon’s gun;
The fiery breath of a foreign sergeant
Meddling.

A bulbous freckle of a man
Sweating, fretting, in the heat
Screeches an order:

Ignored by all

He rolls a muddy cig’rette
And stomps
On the place where once stood your father.

The milky pale faces
Redden
Under the hail of foreign shards -
Tiny capsules of lifeless lead
Sailing through the heavy
Smokeless air.

A croak of defiance.
The cruel bonds
Singe under father’s flint and fire.


Smoke,
Chimney black gags the world,
Takes a foreign sergeant hostage.
The snatcher of the peppery pipe
Chokes on a hangman’s revenge.
A cragged gap in the air! -
But a thief’s chord is forever strung.

There -
The place where he now stands
Tall and proud.
Solemn is your father
As he snaps the peppery pipe.
I watch aghast
As Death smokes its very last.