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