Predators prey
The city’s new star slunk to the darkest part of the bar
then ordered himself a beer and something dark in a jar
The TV static sparked and the door flew open
As his squad loudly rolled in, hopping out their cop cars
“Does lil’ Jimmy got lock jaw,” Sargent Ivan grinned,
parked his butt onside of Jim and ordered up a Heineken.
Meanwhile, the screen espoused what he was poutin’ about:
Press once again catching a cat with a mouse in his mouth.
“Goddamn…everybody’s got a camera now.”
Jim groaned, sipping a beer and along with a tad bit of Crown.
This was going to get worse before it gets any better,
he thought, raising his glass and drinking the last of it down.
Things had been so crazy lately with all the mice hyped chatter
screaming, Rat Lives Matter in large passionate crowds
It all began over the course of maybe five or six months,
When some nine-year-old punk showed his ass to the town
They say he had ADHD, but he was most likely a drunk,
ignoring that psychological junk a patrol cat took him down.
Protect and Serve, right? What’d they expect him to do?
He’s was a cop, and it was just a standard arrest for the dude.
The kid didn’t follow orders and insisted on resisting,
not listening; the cop put his foot on his neck and he stood.
He heard a pop! … The kid’s body stopped fidgeting
The cop shrugged cos the only thing now left was his food.
“They need to just accept it, we’re cats!” Ivan attested.
Still the riotous message from those in fiery protest said
that rightfully arresting is entirely different than the insistence
of some bad cats who wish to kill, devour and digesting them.
“Do he really need to eat the kid, though,” a reporter had asked,
interviewing Jim a week after the “murder” had passed.
“I don’t understand the question.”
and Jim honestly didn’t.
The mouse was dead, eating him was the officer’s business.
Call it instinct, muscle memory, this was just what they did.
It was second nature, it wasn’t hatred. It just sucks for the kid.
And now it was Jim’s turn. His face lighting the screen:
the new spokesperson for the brutality of mice by police.
“They’ll never understand,” Ivan had begun to cry
Another cop beside him began to one-arm hug the guy.
Jim paid his bill and slunk out the back from the crowd
As the others began singing how they were cats and still proud.
*****
Jim walked the streets in a way that betrayed his confusion.
What was the city doin’, having him released without pay?
Meanwhile, it seemed every day, the mice all ran wild
And the police rank and file did nothing to keep people safe.
He walked steady through the square, lost inside his thoughts
and a phosphorous sorta smog, hanging heavy in the air.
Fists clinched and enranged, “officers know the costs
and the responsibility of loss. We live with it every day!”
So walking through the fog, passed anonymous judges
carrying obvious grudges against the new monster of it all.
Fuck this. Jim saw a fountain and crawled to the top of the wall
“What about when an officer falls!? Yeah, how about then?
It’s in my nature to kill and fuck if it’s awkward to y’all
I’m not casting an ominous pall over my favorite skill.
Why should I change? You tell your kids to honor us all;
Bet you never ponder that part, or stay outside of my range.
Fuck all you poor pieces of shit, you’re all comically off
and unironically soft and only exist cos us police, we see fit.
And the dead are hardly a loss to your mess of a community
So this stupd test of your unity is simply not gonna wash.
A crowd stood in horror, appalled; but he was rightfully ignorant
and righteously indignant, so no one with any gall got involved.
Nor were there thoughts to dissolve, till a mouse sprung up from the pack
“that’s fuckin’ funny cat, but why don’t you save that talk for a dog.”
Jim stood their sweating, tone death… in all seriousness,
garely treading water in the strong undercurrents of obliviousness.
“I don’t…I don’t get what you mean.”
and Jim probably wouldn’t.
he was a cop, and any dog that could attack authority shouldn’t.
It horribly stinks…
muscle memory, is this how police think
Or is it that nature and maybe hatred
are both partly instinct
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