Bryan Murphy

Handling the Police

       I

A Sixties anarchist,
real cool, high
on pie-in-the-sky,
fresh out of school,
candid fan of Kropotkin,
this over-educated fool

fell right into their hands, two London Irish heavies,
I was lost in the city night, after ten too many bevvies,
got smacked about in the station, only a broken bone.
Up in court on a false charge, I really should have known.

       II

It was no holiday then, May the First,
But the fine weather called for a stroll,
we had time, to admire Arabia's gifts
to Portugal: colonialism and fine tiles.

At the University of Oporto, the police lay in wait.
A long-haired yob from England, easy target for their hate.
I remember the bound of their boots on the cobbles,
the black flail of their robotic truncheons.
So glad you screamed and ran.
My surprise - it seemed unfair.
Beaten, I ran too.

       III

In Angola, I didn't expect fairness,
and found it.
In building a new society,
police men and women
had a name: "comrade officer",
protector of the people.
Some took it seriously.

After the car accident, I sat in the station for hours, mind numb,
while the officer laughed with the woman's father, his chum.
You warned me to keep cool at an arbitrary fine, act dumb.
Finally he called me over: "Everything is quite clear.
You're 100% right, she's 100% wrong."
Words we love to hear.

       IV

An afternoon in Lusaka, changing planes,
six Italians in tow, right pains.
We walked in front of a police station, in the dark,
failed to see the sign which forbade just that, no lark.

And now I was the one who kept his head,
kept the Italians quiet, out of jail,
understood the arresting policemen's boredom, need of respect.
Two hours in the nick, then an escort to the plane.

       V

China abjures the rule of law.
To the Communist Party, it's just a bore.
The Workers' Paradise is almost without flaw.
Its police are spies, extortionists, killers and more.

"You are to be deported
because you knew the newspaper article well."
Truth be told, that crime of knowledge, reported,
threw me a lifeline out of hell.

       VI

By Brighton Clock Tower, the jolly balloons delighted
our hopes and spirits; music elated, children played, excited,
as we "reclaimed the streets", the police charged, once again
broke heads, punched girls, offered blood to the cameramen.

The "strategy of violence", they used to call it in Italy:
fill society with violence, so it calls out for a heavy hand.
There it was fascist bombs. In England we frown at death,
yet who would have thought it,
in our bland land,
a police force out of control?

       VII

I strive to build a new life in Turin, near Italy,
with little more than money.
Old tastes and affiliations phoenix:
delta blues, home town football, anarchist philosophy.

So when a young squatter dies in jail,
I am not free
to do other than join the march, rail
in protest at the suiciding
of Edo Baleno.

Anarchists unlimited, an international jamboree,
I'm with the Romans, got the accent still, you see.
Bound by music and purpose, the adrenaline of solidarity,
no barriers among us, in this melting pot of anarchy.

I was proud to lurch among such youngsters, until
I caught the light of delight in the eyes of stone throwers
heaving rocks at the windows of the "Palace of Justice". Justice we need.
I freed myself from that crowd, wandered home,
wondered if I still had principles, were they still intact?

And the police? They refused to riot,
stood their ground, behind their shields,
their tension their own feeling, not someone else's strategy,
emphatic, democratic, the way it can be done.

Bryan Murphy is a new poet who has recently settled down to work as a translator in Turin, Italy, after many years travelling the world in the guise of teaching English as a foreign language. Other poems he has written are currently on-line in Aabye's Baby and The Intercultural Platform, and forthcoming in Snakeskin and From the Window.