The ocean barreling waves and penguins
litter the shore hungry for perfect fish.
But it is not just penguins who ask
pleasures offered by oceans.
Fishing boats greed for the delicate flesh
of fins and tails.
The beaches bulk to the north, thin at Snapper
Rocks, but rainbow into one long and broad stretch of sand.
Accidental beaches have crescented unhappily
into something wide, like crossing a desert
for water. We have people coming,
operators, coming in search of the sacred
Golden Tourist,
attracted to Day-Trip Island —accessible
only by boat or by paddling
a dangerous total—
11, 500 penguins surfing. Some buy only wax
to reach the breakers.
Tourists probably attract 10 times the number
of penguins… Penguins plus hundreds of
millions of dollars. Some believe
nature can take back resident rejects,
but the beaches are lifeblood.
The crowded nature sparked a wave;
now there is only one wave. They're hassling
out in the water, it's pretty nasty
for most penguins, the best reason to bring
back life is to ride the hallowed wave—
every penguin
must ride it before it dies.
Wrong Caller
for Arielle Guy
I think someone is on the phone for you
—another well-wisher in a wishing well—
although it may be a snail.
It may be two eyes disguised as eggs—
you never know these days.
But the voice sounds like a razor blade
scraping a branch. I can hear the open
space in its tones. There is something
about this voice,
something silvering like a drop of water,
but in an arid golden desert. There is such a tension,
when I say its a wrong number,
but I'm smiling because I just thought
of an old man’s mustache on the lip of a saucer,
but it feels right at home there. I was just joking,
I say, hold on,
and I'll see if she'll take this call.
In Defense of Love
Pictured in the photograph
is an entry wound.
There is no explanation
Love may have struggled
with the victim. There’s no evidence
to support any of this.
I don’t think anybody
will suggest Love
is so clever.
Look how
that green shirt was torn.
You almost reach a point where
you say, Maybe
they’re wrong.
Maybe, maybe the night
is so clever,
stalking the day,
not the other way—
the prosecution totally looked
at the illicit
relationship
and his insurance policy.
Nothing else
has been done but try
to make the evidence fit their theory
of Love and guilt.
There’s nothing wrong
with considering Love
a suspect.
But wrong
to exclude everyone else.
♥ ♥ ♥
In every life there are bullet holes.
Each different from another.
The first shot may have gone
through the victim’s chest.
There was a mistake
and we corrected it.
Love’s mistake,
we corrected it. We recreated
the situation with simulated tissue.
Remember Dr. Science –
When he was on the stand? –
with all the charts and stuff.
The tissue, Dr. Science says,
we should have used
would have resilience.
Once the bullet penetrates
it ricochets.
It’s elastic. Like the heart.
Whereas we used is a kind of plastic thing
—a representation of heart—
so once a wound was opened it stayed open.
But we discovered,
it doesn’t make any difference.
The elastic stuff that snaps back,
by the time that happens, all the gasses,
all the particles, are lost—
and the bullet is long gone.
So we would like it to be known
that it makes no real difference
between mock hearts, if one snaps back or not.
It’s just as good.
Dr. Science did an experiment
and he discovered he didn’t like what he found.
♥ ♥ ♥
And what did the government of skeleton keywords
do?
What words
did they want to find?
Murder,
gun,
blood,
things like that.
So they grew narrow on suspicious sounds.
The prosecutor and police,
they came here to present to you
those words.
The worst words
they could find
to label Love.
There was the word red
on February the 14th.
A week later
they call out the word murder.
We don’t know from what context
these words were abducted,
dragged down to the station house,
kept without water or food
or any sense of time
in an small interrogation room.
Love may have heard them on the radio,
a rap song,
or watched the news that night
or something else
that would have triggered
his fertile mind.
What we do know
is that there aren’t any words
to measure the thickness
of the elastic heart
or a self-inflicted wound.
♥ ♥ ♥
What Dr. Psyche said
is nobody is in their right mind
when things can get out
of hand real fast, real easy.
Do you really believe that?
That Love would be like that?
So we don’t have context.
We’re not sure who called 9-1-1.
♥ ♥ ♥
Then there is the business about the songs.
Do you like that kind of music?
I’ll be watching you and I’m gonna
make you love me or you will be mine,
you will mine, all mine? You don’t know
who sings the next anthem for stalkers.
It may have been Love. It may have been
16 songs in a row.
There was November Rain. There was—
I’m So Excited too. There are songs
that have nothing to do with anything.
And of the 1324 songs Love could have been listening
to on his iPod, it is the lyrics of the 16 downloaded
that afternoon, which were blown up and put on a
board
for you and the words like strangle, drown,
shot, kill, murder—they’re all highlighted.
How many people don’t have something
like that in their music. Let the prosecutor
listen to all your music and see what crimes
he thinks you’re capable of. You know he will
find something sinister.
Because that’s what he does.
That’s what he’s paid to do.
There was no indication that Love thought
the police were coming for his iPod.
Even the prosecution admits
there may have been other songs,
maybe a don’t worry, be happy,
or an obla-de-obla-da, or que sera, sera,
because love deleted them on that day.
♥ ♥ ♥
So this is the business of the case:
· selectively cull facts
· ignore their context
· change their meanings
· render everything else meaningless
· draw the sinister inference
When we go back to the crime scene, we:
· look at all the facts
· read the blood evidence
· study the photos and the testimonies,
· understand ballistic reports, the timelines,
· drive the route Love took that night.
♥ ♥ ♥
Now we touch adultery,
even though I don’t want to.
I wish it wasn’t here,
because it changes everything around.
That’s what it does.
The victim was going with another guy.
Living with that guy.
They were making their little things.
Young men, like Love, who are doing well—
good job, lots of money—
start feeling foxy about themselves.
They do things they shouldn’t
and he did.
It wasn’t anything more than that.
There was never an expression of love.
There was never any thought.
Nothing.
It is what it appears to be.
They saw adultery. They saw insurance.
Love’s guilty,
they said to themselves walking back
to the police station.
We don’t need to see anything else.
It’s just a question
of finding the pieces to prove that.
♥ ♥ ♥
There may have been only one shot.
Love couldn’t even do that
with one hand.
And you’ve seen the ballistics.
Consider if that it happened,
here’s the scenario you’re stuck with:
This wound in the chest
a few inches below a man’s nipple;
this thing that looks like
a defensive wound
like, as Love said, he was grabbing at the gun.
Then, boom, it fires into his palm, comes
out the other side and enters the chest.
What is the significance of that?
If you’re going to believe Love shot himself,
then you believe that Love could fake
a self-inflicted injury.
If this is the premeditated crime
that the prosecution suggests would Love
have an affair —and not a secret one—
only a month before his wife’s death?
If Love is the person that the government suggests,
would he talk to the police
when he doesn’t have to?
Repeatedly? To this day, Love has never declined
a police interview. Never refused
to testify.
♥ ♥ ♥
If the crime was premeditated
would Love have downloaded a song like that,
with those kinds of lyrics, the afternoon before?
Would he give the police his computer
without requiring a search warrant?
Would Love not know the precise number
of shots fired if Love had done this crime?
Why would Love say it was just one bang?
Why would Love offer something vague
that the police could seize on
and say, sounds funny.
Why did Love drive 10 miles out of his way?
Why would Love shoot himself
in parts of his body, risk his own death?
Why would Love drag the victim
onto the boardwalk to be so quickly discovered?
Why not under the boardwalk? Or up on the roof?
Why didn’t Love steal something?
Or get rid of the gun? Or bury the jewelry?
Love could have thrown her ring in the ocean—
made the whole thing look like a robbery.
Love could have tried to pin it on someone else.
Love called the police
10 miles down the road,
because there are no payphones anymore.
Why would the victim be shot only once?
If it was out of anger, would you not
expect more bullets? If you wanted
to make sure the victim was dead,
wouldn’t you pull the trigger again?
Love wasn’t in that car.
Love wasn’t crooning the boardwalk.
Love didn’t have a gun. Or a knife.
Love’s finger prints were nowhere.
♥ ♥ ♥
There was no evidence
that Love was
ever there.
You must look
only at the facts
of this investigation.
If there is any doubt at all,
—and who wouldn’t
doubt Love—
then we must let Love go.
We must
find:
Love is not guilty of this crime.
J.P. Dancing Bear The American Poetry Journal FM91.5 KKUP's Out of Our MindsDream Horse Press
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