Walls

By Donzel Taylor

People put up walls to protect themselves.

You can’t shoot me down while I’m safe behind my walls.

 

We put these walls up in order to protect ourselves.

But what are we protecting ourselves from?

There is no threat; no gunfire is headed your way.

So why is there a wall?

 

Because once upon a time there was no wall

And you lived life accepting and unafraid

Until somebody you knew hit you with a rock

and gave you a bloody nose

 

Now there is a blood stain on the ground beneath you

And to protect yourself, the first wall falls in front of you

 

Your nose won’t get hit anymore

The rocks wont reach you

And in case you forgot why the wall is there

You left that blood stain on the floor to remind yourself

 

You no longer worry about your face and

you are happy for the moment.

Until a stranger comes in your backyard

And that backyard is where you keep your flowers

the flowers your late grandmother gave you before she passed

 

He tells you he just came to look at your beautiful yard

With trust in his word you go back

to relaxing close to your front wall.

Then you turn around and all of your beautiful flowers are gone.

Now you decide to build a wall in the back

to protect your backyard.

You think now nobody is going to get in here at all.

But you don’t grow new flowers.

You keep the yard ugly to remind you

why you have these walls.

 

Then later paranoia starts to sink in

she begins contemplating, stressing; What is she thinking?

She wonders why this happens to her all the time.

She sits in between her front and back wall and begins to cry.

 

She says I won’t ever let this happen again!

“Nobody will hurt me now, not a stranger nor a friend!”

So she spends a year building more walls over 100 feet tall

no contact with any person

too scared of getting hurt to deal with them at all

and at the end of the year she feels she will finally be safe

and when she thinks about letting somebody in

she looks at the blood stain and empty garden

to remind her of the risk of what happens

if the walls were to break.

 

Soon she decides she wants company

But she built those walls and nobody can get in

She never realized that she blocked herself from

good people too, strangers and real friends.

She couldn’t even keep any of them

Because those walls she put up

Blocked her from seeing who her true friends really are

and this hurt her friends, too.

She couldn’t be heard through the thickness of her walls

and she couldn’t truly be seen because her walls were so tall

people that wanted her affection even tried to climb the walls

but that’s hard to do at 100 feet tall

 

Those walls that were meant to protect

Cause a lot of pain and suffering

And all because she’s afraid of another blood stain on the floor

And another empty garden.

Those walls never made her happy they just made her feel safe.

 

If only she had cleaned up that blood stain

And decided to grow a new garden

She would have had more beauty in life

Those walls will protect you from ugly

But remember they also block you

From the beautiful sights.