RHYME Poem: SINNERS, by L. Paul Sutton

We thought we surely knew
The good, the bad, the true.
But study will dispel
Those lessons learned so well.

But wait! They were so clear–
Those truths that we held dear.
‘Tis hard, as days grow long,
To gather we were wrong.

Reality is not
As simple as we thought.
Most simply do not know
The truth behind the show.

The media declared
That we should all be scared
And hate the souls who crawl
Behind the prison wall.

Fists raised above our head,
We duly damn and dread
Those buried in that lair–
Condemned to perish there.

This beaten path we tread
From fictions we’ve been fed.
But most—they failed to tell
That prison life is hell.

Those stories never said
That prison’s dark and red,
And souls who try too hard
Die quickly on the yard.

Those teachings never told
How youth turns rarely old.
And hearts, afraid to beat,
Soon rupture in defeat.

These men don masks to sell
Indifference to their hell,
To shield them from the glare
Of those who do not care.

Truth, too, dies in the yard,
For honesty’s too hard.
Their masks, a devil’s hood,
Hide any hint of good.

These convicts, to be sure,
Deservedly endure
Some measure of our scorn
For evil they have borne.

“Impossible to see
They’re anything like me.”
Becomes our trite refrain
To vindicate their pain.

But faces behind bars
Are not so unlike ours.
Their hopes turn quick to sighs—
Dreams murdered by their lies.

They live in senseless strife,
This irony of life:
Hate spews with every breath,
Lest decency bring death.

We wonder now aloud
To people who are proud
To banish to their graves
This lot of kindred knaves:

Did they who lie within
Commit the greater sin?
Or we, who cast their fate
To graveyards groomed with hate?