Jurisprudence Poems by Patrick Meighan

Jurisprudence

Poems by Patrick Meighan

Published by Patrick Meighan

27 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Justice for all happens only in the mythological worlds of professorial academics and children’s literature. Still, society values the idea of truth and fairness being weighed in some ideal system of due process. Observers of our courts, like poet Patrick Meighan, not only provide us with insight into this vital universe, but also act as a potential corrective of the most obvious flaws inherent in our real-world legal processes.

Meighan, a former court reporter, opens his modest 27 page collection with a bit of self-reference. He dedicates the book by making a damning point: “For the guilty… we are the guilty.” He’s right, of course, and in a very real way. Aside from a Catholic upbringing saturated with “original sin,” many of us do occasionally accelerate beyond a 55 mph highway speed limit. In addition, dear reader, there may very well be other laws, regulations, and/or commandments that you or I have transgressed on a singularly bad (or exhilarating) day. Let’s go with that assumption as I continue my review.

Showing some common sense, Meighan begins his poetical series with a piece of practical advice to would- be perpetrators in a poem entitled Criminal’s Creed. The poet says,

Nothing good comes of smart-ass ways.

Beat-downs are certain. Don’t look to courts

for vindication. It isn’t there. It’s nowhere.

Hold your peace. Say nothing in answer to

smirks from faces with dark-mirrored glasses.

Internal time keeping invents its own reality in Meighan’s poem called Scene in a courtroom conference room. A lawyer and his client ponder fate, future, and a possible plea under the watchful eyes of the bailiff. The second hand on the institutional clock struggles onward like a mountain hiker. Meighan conveys the tenseness,

…his fingers wrestling one with

another. From the attorney: pale words of

options, of give and take. Meanwhile, the slender

hiker ascends and descends a distant range

of passing minutes. Where would time go

when it’s full of too many minutes to count?

Leaving a vast dessert to walk. A horizon so small

it seems more to fade as one draws nearer.

The door clicks open, giving the bailiff a start.

Too much information can jade one’s view of criminal justice. A well- known appeals attorney, Alan Dershowitz, has postulated the existence of a School for Lying attended by generations of police officers.  Hyperbole aside, many defense attorneys do pass on horror stories of perfidious police avowals. In the piece One true bible, the poet gives us his own take, laced with not a little humor, on this subject. The poem opens this way,

On the shelves thick with dust

of every police academy

you’ll find a dog-eared manual—

passages highlighted,

scribbled notes

misspelled in margins—

to enlighten cops in the craft

of lying.

How to look suspects

coldly in the eye,

not blink, and cite

with confidence

statements made by

nonexistent witnesses.

Or refer to evidence

real only in forensics

labs on TV shows.

Once cops learn this dark craft,

confessions will gush.

Good poetry often provokes. Good poetry can also be brave, but very rarely is. Meighan shows us his brave side in Butter People, a poem dealing with the difficult matter of child molesters. He treads a sometimes very thin line, contrasting the evil behavior of men sodomizing children with other offenders who, convicted of relatively lesser offenses, share with the aforesaid monsters a lifelong fate. The poet keeps good balance through these lines,

Some are self-made

Demons—scarred-faced

Janitor with hair

Slicked back who

Sodomized a child

Served 20 in the pen

Others thrust into

That hell—pimple-faced

Young man consensual

With a teen runaway

What of the drunk boy

Who raped a drunk girl

Two years younger

At a house party

He took advantage

Served eight months

In county lockup

Now counted among

The demonic his face

Crucified on paper

Circulated about for a dozen years

(On the internet for eternity)

Lest you think that this poet comes from a bleeding heart position with squishy feelings about rehabilitating hardened criminals make sure you read his poem Letter to a newspaper. In it he seems to create an apparent composite of letters (not uncommon I bet) sent to newspaper editors from nervy psychopaths complaining of minutia in the face of the blood curdling details of their respective cases. Here’s the heart—excuse my poor word choice—of Meighan’s poem,

… I left my high school

two years ago, not three, as your reporter wrote).

I do however like your objective writing

Unlike TV, you haven’t called me “monster,”

not even in editorializing. And every detail,

how I crept into their room at night

and slashed the mother’s throat, and left

the child for dead, as good as dead, from

the horror with which I forever stained

her mind…

Occasional black humor helps round the sharp edges of some of these narratives. In Meighan’s poem A Richards Hearing waiting to happen, the poet sets up a pretty funny dialogue between an experienced cop and a career criminal doubling as tell-tale rat. Here’s a few of the lines,

… He stiffed me once, so I shut him off.”

“Wait a minute. You say you were his dealer? Pot, or pills?”

A little of both, officer. Mainly pills. I can i.d. the prick for you

if you need me to.”

“I see. What the hell. Sure. Thanks for your help. Who knows

To what depths society might plunge without dutiful citizens like you.”

Meighan’s speaks to a blinded citizenry fearlessly and with intelligence. His poems in Jurisprudence demand nothing less than a recalibration of the scales of justice. And, kudos to him, it’s about time.