We thought we surely knew
What’s good and bad, and true.
But study will dispel
Those lessons learned so well.
Indeed, they were so clear–
Those truths that we held dear.
So hard, as days grow long,
To gather we were wrong.
Reality is not
As simple as we thought.
The public 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’re quick to damn and dread
Those buried in that lair–
Condemned to perish there.
This beaten path we tread
From fiction we have read.
Most versions fail to tell
That prison life is hell.
Most stories never said
That prison’s dark and red,
And souls who try too hard
Die quickly on the yard.
These teachings never told
How youth turns rarely old.
And hearts, afraid to beat,
Are ruptured in defeat.
The masks men use to sell
Indifference to their hell
And protect them from the glare
Of those who do not care.
Truth, too, dies in the yard,
For honesty’s too hard.
A mask, the devil’s hood,
Hides any hint of good.
Those convicts, to be sure
Deservedly endure
Good measure of our scorn
For evil they have borne.
“Impossible to see
They’re anything like me.”
Becomes our trite refrain
To vindicate the pain.
But faces behind bars
Are not so unlike ours.
Where 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.
I wonder now aloud
To patrons who are proud
To banish to such 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?
