A Poem by Eric Evans

Survey

". . . hell doesn't want you,
and heaven is too full . . ."
                     -- Tom Waits, "Earth Died Screaming"

And the survey of the selected
says there is no justice for
the trafficker, no sufficient
retribution for the salesman
of a seven-year-old's still-forming
sex, just a businessman, he'll
claim, matching service to clientele,
finding a market and making it known.

The survey of the selected offered
suggestions of the second bunk
in a rapists quarters, of incarceration
and the burial of an ocean-bound
key, of torture and colonization
and the chance to prey on one
another, of a metal chair and
a slowly flipped switch.

The survey of the selected fell
silent en masse with a thoughtful
pause before a voice rose over
here and a murmur issued from
somewhere there, words measured
for weight and handled with care
as I asked with the certainty
of genetic disease if hell, in
all its permutations, could be too
good for such an enterprising soul,
the punishment grotesque enough
for the incomprehensible crime.




Eric Evans is a writer and musician from Buffalo, New York with stops in Portland, Oregon and Rochester, New York where he currently resides.  His work has appeared in Artvoice, decomP magazinE, Tangent Magazine, Posey, Xenith Magazine, Anobium Literary Magazine, Pemmican Press, Remark and many other publications and anthologies.  He has published seven full collections and three broadsides through his own small press, Ink Publications, in addition to a broadside through Lucid Moon Press.  He is the editor of The Bond Street Review as well as the proud recipient of the 2009 Geva Theatre Center Summer Academy Snapple Fact Award.