The Doomed Man: Sympathy For A Serial Killer Poem by Erica Brett

The infant boy is hidden 'midst
A thousand screaming creatures,
Who one by one are kissed away
Upon their precious features,
And flown away to faraway lands,
Where babies play on rippling sands,
And laugh and scream at marching bands
While clasped between their parents' hands.

But the baby boy is left alone
To whine and whimper and weep,
No mother's touch, nor father's arm
To lift him from the deep.
So in dreams he dwells and makes a world
Where tendrils of darkness creep,
And shadows and blood sing murderous songs
And lullaby him to sleep.

So he enters life a lonely child,
No friends with which to play,
Rejected, cast into the wild
With no dawn nor break of day.
He retreats into that world of his
Where darkness rules as king,
Who punishes all those he hates
And gives him everything.

And the farther he goes
Into his mind,
The farther he gets
From his mankind,
And tortures and kills
What he can find,
While his conscience looks on
With eyes of blind.

He takes revenge
With a cheerful face,
Lures his victims in,
Then at a leisurely pace,
Enacts those dreams
Of night and blood,
And brings upon his man
A wrathful flood
For evils and wrongs
Done long ago
That caused him hurt
And endless woe.

But the Shadow King is not satisfied,
And yet demands more sacrifice
To soothe his boiling blood of hate,
Writhing and twisting in his heart of ice.
So the lonely boy, now become a man
In the rising and setting of the sun,
Becomes a monster at midnight, a drinker of dreams,
His soul ripped and shredded from what he has done.

But he kills again and again, unable to resist
The Shadow King inside his head,
Until one day it screams, and the mob rushes forth
And he finds himself captured instead.

He is brought to trial and tried by his men –
Those creatures who tortured and whom he tortured so –
Turned deaf to his pleas as they did before
And sent him off to death row.
So in darkness he waited for years upon years,
His face growing old and his hair growing gray,
For the Light that would dry his tears and fears,
And so arrived his execution day.

He was brought to a room and strapped in a chair,
His hair cut away and the wires wrapped round
Like twisting tendrils of shadowy Death,
Caressing the flesh it had bound.
Then a switch was thrown and Light flooded his eyes
And dripped into the blooded tears he cried,
And his soul sprang forth from its monstrous ties –
The man who was freed the day that he died.