William Ward Butler
Rip-Off
You can’t drink coffee every day and have good teeth
without full employment dental insurance full offense
to men who can charm the Glock off an officer with a smile
whiteness is like that they get sentenced and get off
isn’t that what happened with Brock why I wanted to off him
when I heard he wouldn’t get off Miller behind that dumpster
his lawyer called it outercourse isn’t the law awful
rotten to its core one bad apple offs the whole bunch
how often cop apologists forget that last part all cops
are bastards is a complete sentence police cop a plea
on brutality then want to off themselves once they see
what confinement’s like the law’s coffin I’ve taught
boys of privilege keys to the coffer their parents
caught more money offshore than God’s fishermen
when you’re rich it’s easy to be an offender the distance
between an official story and what happened
caged predator shuffled offstage industrial runoff
blood of victims thick as petroleum if angels
still exist they must be blitzed singing off-key
William Ward Butler is the poet laureate of Los Gatos, California. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bennington Review, The Cortland Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Points, Hunger Mountain, and other journals. He is a poetry reader for TriQuarterly and co-editor-in-chief of Frozen Sea: frozensea.org