The Wall (Dedicated to the West Memphis Three: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley Jr.)

The town constructed a wall
to block reason from their minds.
They believed themselves righteous,
safe from evil behind bricks of fear
and ignorance, because everyone
inside the wall knew that

Evil is the black t-shirts teenagers wear
and the metal music they listen to.
It’s Stephen King books, Wicca,
and those three juveniles
who didn’t quite measure up
to their one-size-fits-all mentality.
Particularly evil was a young man
who defiantly sought a truth they
all feared might infect them with
the inconvenience of free thought.

Wasn’t the murder of three little boys
an omen? On the big screen,
(Which, of course, is reality),
Damien walked among them,
Satan’s son, or near enough if you
kept your eyes tightly closed.
And the police knew that he butchered
those little boys, so why waste
time on the trivialities of fact or evidence?
After all, they had faith on their side,

faith in shoddy police work and bias,
the mortar and trowel of injustice.
Logic fights to creep through
the countless cracks in the foundation
of a wall, which penned up ‘the freaks’
as effectively as it sheltered a killer
whom they never bothered to find.

Big Skin

Drunk with lust and a need
to quench the thirst
welled up from recesses
of the night’s rhythm,
you didn’t consider
a woman with amoral desires;
too foolish to recognize pity,
you felt it necessary to expunge
the guilt of your sexuality.

I entertained no notion of strings
puppeteering a method to an end.
While there’s benevolence in roving hands,
without your need for delusion
I wasted no time
on empathy, schemes or love.

Then the moment:
our bodies wiped clean
of sweat and avarice;
the mask peeled away
from a little boy in big skin
waiting for an invitation
that would never come.