Section 12 Fair Cop

You get out of school with no O levels and the girl next door knocked up and obviously you want to do the right thing. So you join the police. The uniform impresses the in-laws and gains you high moral ground. No-one bothers you when you boss other people around.

You get up for work early each morning, kiss your wife and kid over breakfast and salute the Queen. “Don’t be silly,” wife giggles. “Just go do your work. Just make sure you get back home in time for tea and Eastenders and tucking the little one in.”

Everything is sweet. You have no doubts. Perps are scum and you always stick up for one of your own.

A public service, cop thinks, as he parades his beat. Watching couples canoodling on benches, checking there’s no nipple showing and shooing gypsy kids away. Nosing into the health and safety requirements on the building site and checking out the thickness of the tires of passing cars.

*

Breakfast is a riot as they scoff down their sausages and egg and mock left-wing female politicians appearing on breakfast TV on the HD screen overhead for being overweight and soft on crime. Fearful for their jobs, WPCs titteringly join the fray.

They are all now pumped up ready for the day.

Cop stops Jude coming back from work. “What you got in that bag?” “None of your business,” Jude replies. Cop looks at him threateningly. “You giving me lip?” Jude sighs, dumps down the bag. No reason to give the pig reason for arresting him for resisting arrest.

*

Steph skids into the quad at high speed. Cop jumps in as Yu and Da go into convulsions on the sunset lit grass.

“We got a warrant?”

“No need,” Steph replies, “Anti-terror operation.” Cop swoons.

The pair speed siren wailing into the close and leap out. Cop rushes round trying door-knobs and, if that don’t work, shouldering the door and muscling in or bashing the frosted glass out with a rifle butt. Steph has brought guns. Just in case. They are on a rush.

*

Cop feels his knees sag and drop, and the sound of an ambulance arriving,

a drip, a pulse, and unconsciousness well before bedtime.

 

Section 13 Passers-by

The police canvas two hundred

passers-by outside.

“I’m busy. I’m not talking.

I don’t want to get involved.

I’m not interested in politics,” are the usual replies.

So many passers-by and no-one saw

nothing, nought, nada, zilch, zip, njet, nein, nil, love…

the poet chief inspector avers,

remembering a poem from his youth.

So many people pass us by,

so many faces are not yours.

One point three billion not yous

in China alone

and every second more are born.

But only you are you

and always only will be you,

as I will always only be myself.

I seems unfair somehow:

that, of so many, for so long,

there must be only one of us,

and that,

if there were many,

we’d be less

*

But more unjust by far

the fact

that you and I can’t be

just one.

 and one he penned just recently:

Comet

You came,

Aster felix or Aster nefastus,

uncharted out of the blue.

I cannot calculate whether

you will be a destroying angel

or fall into a quiet orbit

or simply sail beautifully away across the sky.

Your comet hair flies back thrillingly

behind you as you speed confused,

moth-like, by gravity and light,

through absence of air.

I cannot tell whether you are Heaven’s Gate

or the gate to Hell.

I just yearn to hitch a ride.

 

What was that young lad’s name anyway?

–the one who almost died–

I must remember to ring his missus,

send him flowers and fruit.

 

Intermission

The reader in his grotto pauses

the story for a breather to make

some apt but unkind remarks.

“Hang on! Chief Inspectors of Police

don’t write love poetry, except

on TV! And young lads who join

the force aren’t anywhere near

as oafish as you make them out

to be. As for the plot, I lost it

way back, when we left off

those two Russian dolls.

And besides you’re nothing

like the likes of me, and you

sure ain’t my brother, mate.