Death Row is a lonely place. Silence echoes through the walls with as much force as a cannon being fired in the Grand Canyon.

A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.

Such references are inappropriate and insensitive, and, as part of a discussion of the death penalty in the Commonwealth of Virginia, trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust,

The silence that is in the starry sky,The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

If there ever was a poet for the working class Billy Joe Shaver and Merle Haggard would be my nomination.

I've written songs about things that nobody else has ever written about.