Police Cop, by Danny Collier

For Bryan Hodges, who first invented and then forgot Police Cop.

Contents

Police Cop and The Kids

Meet Police Cop

Police Cop pulls his gun, strokes his taser, flips his baton, tilts his pelvis, drops his shoulder, chimes his cuffs. It's a shame how these days nobody can understand the elegant language of semaphore.

On Propriety

Police Cop's absence from love poems does not constitute a precinct rule. While the Captain kisses the chief in her office, their profiles shadowed by privacy glass, Police Cop stands near a crossroads, likewise in shadow, alert for a perp.

On Architecture

Police Cop likes the square buildings that stand on stilts, leaving spaces in which he can find Police Cop.

On Ceezy

Ceezy the Camaro driver paid extra to the Commonwealth that we may know that he or she is, was, and will forever be Ceezy the Camaro driver.

On Velocity

Police Cop flows out through the radar gun's electronic guts, rides its microwaves to the speeding car, from which he reflects upon the shadowed, tall, solitary form of Police Cop.

Meet The Kids

A geyser of dirt, a hole in the ground, and a pyramid of ejecta. Folks, your neighborhood is infested with kids. Guard your spaghetti. Clear your house of cokes. Watch the kids scatter. Watch them leave one kid standing by himself so he's just a kid for a moment, then he's the kids again.

On Forecasting

In the guise of a cloud, the kids disassemble a car. They have no grasp of commerce. They have no plan. They have only high pressures and depressions, motions to their own winds, and a slight axial spin that's unlikely to take them beyond tropical storm status.

On Making Distinctions

Some officers take requests, lean you on your car, cuff you while your friends laugh and take pictures. Other officers do not.

Ontology

His helmet says "Police" and his shirt says "Police" and his badge says "Police" but his heart says "Cop"

On Procedure

Police Cop files reports. He fails to file reports. He calls for backup. He forgets to call. At roll call, he finds he isn't naked. It's worse. He wears his uniform but he forgets his mirrored shades. He looks at a world that looks back at him and that's it. That does it. That wakes up Police Cop.

On Secret Wars

This off-brand convenience store ignores the Falwells, foregoes the wire circle, stocks its wooden top shelf so kids wrinkle comics, stepping on Spider-Man, Wolverine and the Hulk as they steal Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler and Chic. Falwells would have us take the kids to the woodpile but they're already in the woodpile. It's a great place to hide your comics.

On Literature

Police Cop doesn't read novels. He puts them under surveillance.

On Degrees of Scale

As the kids escape, the theatre floor's soda grip slows them imperceptibly. Meanwhile, to be fair, it slows the older, stronger, angrier pursuing usher to the same degree, imperceptibly.

On Responsibility

When Police Cop rides a motorcycle, that motorcycle knows it's been ridden. That motorcycle feels like sunglasses fell from the heavens to garnish its cool. When Police Cop drives an unmarked cruiser, he drives that cruiser anonymously, such that the cruiser wonders who left it somehow even more unmarked than before.

On Youth Culture

Police Cop's face on the young punk's t-shirt. The kids love Police Cop because they can't appropriate him. So they do.

In Haiku

Lost in a haiku Instead of cherry blossoms You find Police Cop

Sanity and Momentum

On Sanity

On row house stoops and metro trains, in vacant lots and alleyways, where endings meet endings those who scream at nothing stand and scream at nothing.

On Linguistics

On every single metro car, Police Cop. Yes, on every metro car, Police Cop. Identical and redundant, listening for your telltale regional accent.

On the Color Wheel

The woman yelling "Suck my goddamn dick!" at the blue row house will soon be yelling "Suck my goddamn dick!" at the red row house.

On Crying Out In Need

(for Daniil Kharms) The kitten in the tree calls for the old lady. The old lady calls for the kitten in the tree. The kitten in the tree has need of Police Cop; therefore, the old lady has need of Police Cop. It's time for crying out now, crying out in need. So the old lady calls Police Cop. Police Cop hears the lady calling, "Police Cop! Police Cop! Police Cop! Police Cop!" and the kitten mewing, "Old lady! Old lady! Old lady! Old lady!" in the time for crying out, crying out in need.

On the Nature of Being

The kid in the blue superhero skirt doesn't know that she's a superhero.

On the Metro

The kids place dead rats on the tracks at night. They give up their sleep so we'll know death's smell when it comes for us.

On Momentum

The St. Vitus guy takes the metro train. Weekday to weekday, station to station. Even when he's at his destination. Even when the train is not in motion. He dangles from an invisible rope. He dances against deceleration.

On Giving A Fuck

You start by not giving a fuck and go on that way for awhile. Then you worry you're not sincere. The way you don't give a fuck now seems contrived when you look back on your not giving a fuck canon.

On Broadway

Police Cop gave me a ticket. He handed me a citation. It was like a song. I sang the chorus, sang it like a song pulled from his lyrical pink pad. The Chorus Goes Here He said I could go on my way. He said, "Be about your business." But my business was him. I was about being like a song pulled from his lyrical pink pad. The Chorus Also Goes Here Then he climbed into my mirror. He stood and shrank himself away, faded like a song. Both of us faded like songs Police Cop pulled from his lyrical pink pad. And Here Is The Chorus: If the verse is in first person, the chorus shifts to second. You break the rules, you pay the fine. It's written on your ticket. It's written on your ticket.

On Meaning

7-11's ecosystem and its place in the ecosystem writ large. I go there when I don't need anything they're selling. What is it that I need? I need a priest. I need a research grant. I need a crack team of philosophers. I want to find a moral in this place. I have to find a moral in this place. They have those oddly wrinkled sausage rolls.

On Fan Fiction

Police Cop shoots his gun metaphorically. Perps transform into mist cinematically. The orgy progresses systematically in bold combinations of greased Police Cop.

On Locomotion

He walks in circles outside the station as you board the train and the train departs. He walks in circles at the last station as the train arrives and you disembark. It seems he travels by means of circles instead of by train as some people do.

On Parts

for Dean Taciuch A hooker with a heart of gold. What's that all about? I once met a cook with a kidney of quartz, a short order cook. He made eggs for me. He kept perfect time. Lots of people have meat organs. They don't talk about it but it's all you need to know about them.

On A Baker's Half-Dozen

Police Cop gets the donut jokes. He doesn't mind the donut jokes. He knows he's like the donut hole at the center of the donut, ever-present in the donut, a component of the donut that makes the donut a donut by its absence from the donut.

On Vaginas

The schizophrenic screaming in your face about vaginas has a lot to say about vaginas.

On Consistency

Hanging out his window, all day, every day, the young man says "kiss me" to no one, in Spanish.

On Antics

The kids pass easily among the counted syllables and ignore arbitrary line breaks. They speak-a the English. They know grammar is just a nut punch among friends. They know logic is just another wet willie and to draw conclusions is to drop your trousers and bend at the middle. They know all this mooning doesn't lead anywhere.

On Specificity

Just before the apocalypse, not the final apocalypse, the most recent apocalypse, the interim, forgettable, no consequence apocalypse, a young woman, beautiful and off her meds, rose to preach "And Jesus! Not God, not Christ! But Jesus! Baby Jesus!" to the last commuter in the last car.

On Amateur Night

On amateur night Police Cop's routine doesn't ever change. He waits for his turn on amateur night then walks to the mic. He stares at the crowd and the crowd stares back on amateur night.

On the Value of Small Gestures

He took a shit on the corner. They put that shit on Google Earth.

On the Endless BMX

The subatomic lattice of bike-riding kids, wheel to wheel to wheel, loves you because you are muddy and rutted and theirs to tear up.

Caring and Corpses

On Caring

The kids take a long walk off a short, sharp cinquain. It's not that they're careless. They just don't care.

On Narcotics

Police Cop chooses to ignore the pot you hide in your pocket. But later, when you reach into your pocket, you find your pot, yes, with a pen, a blank journal, and a photo of Police Cop.

On Prosody

The kids are not afraid to rhyme, though rhyme is an old house boarded up and haunted by dead and formless forms. See the kids walk up the path, footsteps like prosody. Watch them knock on the door with their eyes full of crime.

On Legislation

You can float a bill to legalize unicorn fucking in Congress but that won't make it law or fill the halls of Congress with horny unicorns.

On Hopeless Causes

Police Cop responds to a domestic. He drifts non-corporeal through the house's door, through its interior walls, and through the couple, who keep on fighting despite the concerned presence of Police Cop.

On Industry

The kids make shivs, show shivs to kids. Those kids make shivs. They compare shivs, trade shivs for shivs, sell shivs to kids, put shivs to work, shiv kids with shivs. The point is, they're industrious, these kids with shivs.

On Corpses

We find a body in the morning and again we find a body as the sun goes down on Corpse Town. Did I mention we live in Corpse Town? So many corpses we named our town after them. We could be Gold Rush. We could be Wine Town, Canning, Cedar, Mountaintop, or Poet's Crossing if our most common resource was something besides bodies, lost and found.

On Advertising

This car repair shop says, "We fix everything!" That car repair shop says, "Believe in Jesus!" We're lucky to have such fine car repair shops. Our town is quite poor, with many broken cars.

Yay! Hurray!

Death as a matter of course. Death as a matter of profit. Death upon death upon death. Are you going to eat your pancake? I would like to eat your pancake. Oh, and death.

On Patterns

The kids lie down on yellow lines and circle each other with chalk. As the flow of rush hour traffic draws blurred lines around their outlines, some fat ass bastard whose opinion counts says, "That's not how you play hopscotch."

On Beauty

Police Cop orders an armored car from the motor pool. The motor pool says it's all out of armored cars, which is a lie but it's a beautiful lie, satisfying, satisfying to Police Cop.

On Being Prepared

Police Cop goes flat. The whole world pauses then resumes its spin. Back at the precinct, the needles and dials mark the crime rate's rise until Police Cop, who's always prepared, pops his cruiser's trunk and pulls out flares, a tire iron and a spare Police Cop.

On Waking Up

Police Cop feels like you would feel if you found yourself waking up on your feet on a train underground in motion, unaware of how you got there or where you're going or even that you're Police Cop.

On the Playground

Police Cop enters the playground, which is a spotlight, a blood dot squashed flat under a microscope, a magic circle drawn in chalk, inside of which he fears he'll be diva, doctor, demon, belly filled up with arrogant wizard, belly filled up with Police Cop.

On Warnings

The kids form a dragon in the southwest corner by the lemon juice rune that warns, "Here there be crime."

On Haiku

Murder! Murder, then blossoms, grass, branches or snow. Surprise! More murder!

On Dissemblances

Police Cop flattens and spreads across the crime scene like oil, bile, or blood. Like oil to soak up the essence of crime and make a justice dressing. Or, if we must be literal when comparing a thing to a thing, like bile to break down crime like ribbons of duck fat. But now we've compared two things to two things and we've killed our haiku lines when our poor haiku just wanted dinner and blood and maybe a last kiss from Police Cop.

On Evidence

Police Cop leaves coffee cups. He doesn't litter, he doesn't crime, but as he goes he leaves the ghosts of coffee cups, blind styrofoam and aether cups, each containing a little sip of Police Cop.

On Mystery

Police Cop decides he must solve the mystery. He solves the mystery. Log it in the ledger: another job well done. His methodology, his tools and his sources, his clues and conclusions… What are they? Who are they? What was the mystery? Another mystery! Log it in the ledger. A job for Police Cop!

Honors

Police Cop's most decorated colleague wins another award, another promotion, another raise, and yet another front-page story for being the officer who most resembles Police Cop.

On Selling Out

Police Cop won't shill, not even Hostess Fruit Pies that burst with the fruit of justice.

On Empathy

Police Cop greets the dirty cop. His shift ends as Dirty's begins. As he takes off his uniform to put on a fresh uniform over the black and blue and gold- buttoned uniform of his skin, the coyote and the sheep dog in the break room on the TV punch in and out as if to say, "We understand you, Police Cop."

On Being Left Behind

Then the corpses pull themselves together, rise and nod to one another, put hands in hands and walk away without trumpets, choirs or Jesus, leaving only stains and weapons, chalk outlines and scattered red flags, warnings placed there after the fact, clues for the clueless abandoned by crime.

Frank, Long Dead, Says

Certain people demand complicated explanations when in truth they are just not invited to my party.

Change and Eternity

On Change

You think and think and think about changing. Police Cop can change whenever he wants. Stuck on the highway, stuck on your commute, stuck pondering fate, predestination, and other such rot, you see Police Cop cross the median near the sign that says, "For Official Use."

On Getting Around

The kids ride long boards, skate boards, roller skates, inline skates, scooters, unicycle stilts (one wheel on each stick) then a single stilt with a single wheel, with the kids on top the way angels dance, uncountable and unaccountable.

On Police Cop's Beat

His beat includes the mall. Of course it does. When he walks through the mall, he deforms it. It folds around him, shards to his lodestone, like his mirrored glasses are fundamental, electromagnetic, invisibly touching the shoplifter, swapping flavors in the Baskin Robbins, tapping each parked car on one fogged window then moving on.

On Faith

The kids swallow gum and hold it inside for seven long years and three shorter years, then they spit it out, salute alchemy, put on witchy hats, fondle prayer beads, invoke ancestors, envision Buddha embracing Jesus with Allah's strong arms, praise the lost cargo, and mould a golem to destroy their foes ecumenically.

On Record

For Carmela Ciuraru Police Cop knows all the dumb shit you ever said. He does not care. All the friends you have offended? The ones who wake you up at night? Tell them you have a clean record. Tell them to go to the precinct. Tell them they can get a report on your progress from Police Cop.

On Fallacies

The kids tell stories around a campfire that doesn't exist except in stories.

On Pop Music

Police Cop wears his helmet in his cruiser. He Corey Harts, though he would not get that reference. In the eighties, he didn't listen to pop music. He was several thousand years too old for that bullshit.

On Origins

One theory tells us that the kids exploded from the Earth, which implies that they will leave us some day, expanding forever or collapsing at last. Other theories include divine intervention, malevolent action, consequences of our immoral behavior, a rude spontaneous generation from our discarded soda cans, etcetera, et al, but in truth we don't know and the kids won't tell us.

On Righteousness

Police Cop enforces the ordinance forbidding all righteous indignation. Despite electronic ticketing and despite his speedy blue helicopter, the indignant persist in indignance, offenses pile up, and perps multiply. Call the mayor. Tell him it's an outrage. The law is the law and that's how things work. Tell the mayor that we won't stand for it. Tell the mayor we need more Police Cop.

On Resemblances

Police Cop is not an onion, nor is he like an onion nor is he in fact or in likeness a set of Russian nesting dolls. He's more like a Tootsie Roll Pop held tight by a scholarly owl, at the limits of its patience as it licks and licks Police Cop.

On Eternity

Police Cop stands forever on that corner you passed in dad's maroon Buick the first time you left home. Start driving. Trust muscle memories. Past the mall that's no longer a mall, the houses where friends lived, all the replaced places placed in their old places. No matter what they say, you can go home again. If you lose your way, just turn left at Police Cop.

On Manifestations

Police Cop as a faux coffin in the abandoned gothic hall. Police Cop as a dust devil circling the razed Mall of Murder. Police Cop as a smudge of cells joining origin and end times straddle-legged to clock the demons on their way to buy comic books at the churches they have chosen by intention or omission at the busy intersection of Your Old Friends and Police Cop.

On Crossing Over

The standalone arcade, the arcade in the mall, the corner store Zaxxon and the Putt Putt game room. The kids can take you there by bicycle ferry if you saved a token to put under your tongue.

On Fitness

Police Cop stands on the left side and on the right side of the globe, a whole world varnished with crystal layers of crime. With his left hand, he grabs Police Cop. With his right, he grabs Police Cop. The world rolls on a spindle of Police Cop as Police Cop crunches his abs.

On On and On

Having once touched disassembly, the kids turn their eyes to the world and they pull the world to pieces and put the pieces in boxes and pull the boxes to pieces and put those pieces in boxes and pull those boxes to pieces.

On Enough Being Enough

The kids are on our property. Our property's inside the kids. They confound the laws of trespass, inverting the order of things. They should respect our property. They should observe biology. They should obey physical laws. They should be particles or waves. Instead, our stuff's covered in kids, surrounded and suffused with kids who confound our laws of trespass, becoming our fences and lands, and judge the way we choose to live inverting the order of things.

On Falling From On High

Police Cop stands on skyscrapers to calculate a penny's path from boredom through velocity down to negligent homicide. He would melt down every coin and beat the lumps to plowshares if he caught pennies in the act or if nickels fit the profile. He would dance our cares to nothing if the public built a dance hall with spinning disco penny lights and space for his skyscraper shoes. Until then, he just does the math: pennies per second per second, perfect boredom falling in space, E = MC Police Cop.

On Sequences

First the kids graffiti a bridge then they do a lifetime of stuff, the stuff you do in a lifetime, which takes each of them a lifetime before they drift back to the bridge, where each kid touches the spray can that's hung there waiting in the air, waiting for them for a lifetime. They get back to work on the bridge and they tell each other nothing.

On Surveillance

This vast network of satellites, half in sun, half eclipsed by Earth, comprehensive, multi-spectral, could be the aluminum eyes of Police Cop. But Police Cop sits alone in his dark cruiser, cold coffee in his thermal mug, static on every channel, and keeps watch on an empty road.

On Recursion

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