Red and blue.
Red and blue lights.
Red and blue light flashing,
screaming,
tearing through the quiet night.
A terrible and beautiful display.
They light up the street
and the stars seem to shrink away,
as if giving space
for the first responders to work.
On a path
that takes me nowhere near their
spectacular assembly,
I alter my course to get nearer,
but not too much.
That old sadistic voyeur whispers;
“Just a little closer.”
What manner of bad fortune
has befallen some poor soul this night?
A motor vehicle collision,
are their bodies in the streets?
Have the police got their man,
might they fight the suspect to the ground?
Have the lawmen become the lawless?
Have they shot and killed someone,
feeding the fire of outrage
and fuelling debates on modern social justice?
Old, dark angel on my shoulder whispers,
“Who cares? At least it wasn’t us, right?”
Sensibility returns,
steering me back towards my destination,
leaving the grim theater
of morbid speculation behind.
The men and women
who don the uniforms of society’s protectors,
are sometimes society’s councillors,
but often our janitors.
How must it be,
to have your presence
be synonymous with tragedy?
With fear, with death, with pain?
Stand-ins for our darkest moments,
rarely venerated,
but often ostracized
and avoided,
like harbingers of all bad fortune.
With the lights at my back,
red and blue.
Red and blue lights.
Red and blue lights flashing.
I put as much distance between them and myself
as fast as the law will allow
and I wonder,
do they still have an angel
on their shoulder,
and if so, which one?
Red and blue lights in the darkness,
never blending to form a purple hue,
but always exposing our
old, dark, voyeuristic selves,
always alighting our fate.
HG -2016
