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.
