- Non-Erotic Poetry
- Denizens: Ben
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Click hereBen sleeps in his uniform, people would joke,
and he always laughed as if it weren't true.
Ben wasn't too sure what were jokes anymore--
When you laugh over corpses you tend to forget.
Ben joined the cops 'cause he liked to drive fast,
he liked to shoot guns and push niggers around,
and he liked how he looked in his badge and his blues
that he wore like soft armor against a hard world.
No one much liked it when Ben came around
and Ben came around way too often these days.
He'd come through the door in a blast of cruel sunlight;
The afternoon drinkers would cringe on their stools.
Screwdriver breakfast and Absolut lunch,
sunglasses 24 hours a day;
He'd stop by on duty and stay for three hours--
Breath mints to mask the wet stink of his shame.
He'd talk about horrors as if they were sit-coms.
He'd talk about death while he ate pickled eggs.
He'd talk about niggers in front of the bus boy.
He'd talk to the waitress like she was a whore.
Ben used his hate the way people used air,
and chewed on his anger as if it were food.
He lived the illusion that he was maintaining;
ate pills for the demon that murdered his sleep.
Just a little black girl in a white Sunday dress
standing over her mother with blood on her shoes,
who asked him if she would be his little girl now
and clutched at his sleeve when they took her away.
Ben bagged the girl's mother and busted the boyfriend
and tossed the girl into the state care machine.
Now Ben sees white dresses around every corner,
in the dead eyes of junkies, in beckoning graves.
Ben tries to drown her with vodka and bluster--
Just another dumb nigger without any hope,
who'd grow up to suck cock and smoke rock and get babies
and die before she had a chance to grow old.
Now nightly she stands at the foot of his bed,
eyes begging for answers, with blood on her shoes.
He stares at his pistol and tastes the gunmetal
and holds his black face in his black, calloused hands.
- COMMENTS
The Muttover 11 years agoAuthorIf anybody is still interested all these years later:
Ben is based on a real African American policeman I knew, and an episode of COPS I saw.
Ben hated most everybody, but he really hated "niggers".
To him, any Black person who didn't conform to the accepted standards of society needed to be put down. They disgraced his race.
And the episode of COPS with the girl in the Easter dress haunts me to this day.
LeBrozover 16 years agoThis poem was mentioned in the Archival Review thread, in a picking through Lit's archive of over 37,000 poems.
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LeBrozover 16 years agoRead this on through with your mask of political correctness in place and watch your reaction change when you come to the end. Powerful social commentary.
twelveooneover 19 years agoThis is great..
"Ben bagged the girl's mother and busted the boyfriend
and tossed the girl into the state care machine."
The whole thing has a lot going for it, except the last line mystifies me. If Ben is black,(this seems to be emphasized) this line "He'd talk about niggers in front of the bus boy." would be a useless.
Anonymousover 19 years agoHoly shit! <---my first reaction.
This poem is strong, and written so well that I wonder if you know the character of the poem personally. If not, this poem displays your ability to think critically about other people and imagine what motivates them. A strong, dark poem-- bitter coffee with all the dregs. And oddly, that is a good thing because it's a taste one never forgets.
