by Emily Kagan Trenchard
Just a few days after, one of the wealthiest men in Germany
did it because he had lost his fortune to a con artist.
There was a man in Texas who did it after America
watched him ask a 13 year old for a blow job on television.
In fact, when a naked man, crazed, standing on the roof of a building
in Brooklyn threatened a group of police officers with a neon light bulb –
the kind with the long incessant buzz and the ability to wash
away your life under its glow – when this shriveled threat of a man
was tasered and fell off the roof to his death, the commanding officer
on the scene did it. Not the cop who pulled the trigger.
And I bet your wondering about him, too.
About that beat cop who took the order, unsnapped the taser from his belt,
shot it and thought, "Maybe this will shock some sense into the guy,"
A good joke he planned to share with the boys after they got the hell off that roof.
That cop who grinned as all that naked chaos stumbled backward,
tugging at the blue-charged hooks until the skin tore
like it was following orders. I wonder about that man,
on the night he found out his commanding officer killed himself.
I wonder if he felt like nothing more than a finger. I wonder if he had even considered doing the same before then.
And if he didn't, did that make him more or less of a man?
And so this is the question for you, officer:
Maybe this was a bad bet on how many people on a train might have camera phones.
Maybe you wanted to see, just once, what it would feel like to slip it in.
Maybe you were nothing more than a twitch of the wrong finger.
But now, you will never be anything but that boy, lying cuffed on the
train platform, stunned and flickering out.
Everyone has their part to play: the city of Oakland will burn and burn
again for another dead boy it didn't mean to kill.
The police department will issue statements and conduct safety training,
This young man's name will be in a rap song. His daughter will have a college fund.
And you: you are no longer police.
But when you wake up tomorrow, and you're standing in your kitchen
staring the coffee pot, your thick white thighs pushing against the hem
of your boxers, your face unshaven for three days now, your girlfriend away
at her mother's house, and you can't go outside because the news vans are there,
and your brother called again because the reporters are calling him too,
and suddenly you will need to find a job in this shitty economy and you can't
watch TV because they keep showing pictures of the kid you shot, there's no
bar to slump into and this city will not have you, you fucked up and you know that
but your lawyer says keep your mouth shut, you're 27 and you have a lawyer, and you
just want a god damn cup of coffee but you can't because your hands,
you hands have disappeared.
And will that be enough?
Emily Kagan Trenchard is a poet and science writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. She is co-curator of the louderARTS Project poetry reading series and the Project's Slam Master.
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