Concrete Baptism
Let the heads bow, not in prayer but in slow surrender to the ledger’s demand,
no saints in these pews–just men and women processed by a judge’s hand.
Here every confession is an invoice, every sin a scan,
mercy stripped for parts, absolution measured in an hour’s span.
He stole bread for the hollowed bellies of kin,
the sentence fell like lead, twenty years to grind his skin.
No weapon drawn, no body lost,
only the crime of hunger, paid at criminal cost.
Justice dressed in polished shoes drops the gavel with a sterile grace,
a childhood flickers and vanishes, file closed, no trace.
Steel doors hymn their verdicts with an iron ring,
the child’s last lullaby a lock’s final spring.
Concrete baptism flows through corridors lined with numbers,
a sanctuary built from human thunder.
Sanctified transactions behind walls scrubbed sterile for the tour,
souls turned to data, rusted before they mature.
He entered the tomb while the flesh was soft–
he’ll leave in rust, if he ever leaves at all,
a spirit mortgaged, a future sold for a margin call.
No restoration, no path to repair,
only bodies filed and stacked, legal rows of despair.
She signed a check with a borrowed name–
now scours toilets in a cell, laundering shame.
A private prison’s key is profit, justice a figment of procedure,
policy suffocates hope, reform is just theater.
Three strikes to kill a prayer, one plea to barter hope,
silence follows–sealed, final, wound tight with rope.
No one visits, no one remembers–
only numbers and daily embers.
This isn’t redemption–it’s managed decay,
a formula to bleed for those who own the day.
Every year another dividend, every inmate a cost recouped,
barbed wire crowns, cells like pews, sermons looped.
Control is preached in orange, hymns written in law,
stakeholders cheer as more names withdraw.
You don’t get clean, you get erased,
name rinsed from records, but not from fate.
System holy, mercy fake,
a chapel built on every break.
Concrete baptism–barred and bound,
a silence so heavy it warps the sound.
Each brick pressed from another broken back,
salvation sold by the racks.
Amen to profit, amen to pain,
another body loaded onto the chain.
Let the numbers praise the sentence,
let the machine intone each name–
and as freedom is auctioned,
the walls close, untouched by blame.