A poet, a police officer 10/13/21
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Thought of an old friend, I'm not  sure why. It was more than a decade
ago  that I  last saw  him.  Haven't heard  from him  since, but  that
doesn't make him less of a friend in my mind.

He was  a police  officer, but  he hated being  a police  officer. His
father was one, and his older brother was one. I think his grandfather
was too, if I recall correctly. I never asked, but I'm guessing he got
into the business for the most obvious reasons. Very little resistance
in a path that your family has known for generations.

Perhaps his problem was  that he was a poet. Not  the kind that writes
down words, but the kind that  dreams and watches the clouds and loves
the wind. Can a  police officer be a poet, or vice  versa? Maybe so. I
know another police officer now who's a writer (at least in his heart,
and as an avowed wish.)

The issue  with my  old friend was,  I think, that  the weight  of his
profession got into his soul. The grime  of it. The ugliness of it. He
talked  about an  instance  once, it  was a  sting  operation with  an
undercover officer acting as an underage prostitute. Things were going
well,  until the  arrest. In  the  car of  the suspect  he found  some
religious items. He  spoke with the man, and learned  that he had been
in trouble with the law, and had been seeking redemption.

This  troubled my  friend  greatly. It's  not an  ugly  thing to  seek
redemption, and it's not necessarily an  ugly thing to slip up in that
seeking. Something else got to him,  I think. It was his poet's heart,
and poet's mind.  In those, he saw the world  in black-and-white ways,
where the good did good, and the bad  did bad. And here was a man, who
wanted to be good, to do good, but he was not doing good. Was this man
good? Or bad? Or is it really that simple?

I never spoke  with my friend about  this after he told  me the story.
But I've  thought about it.  I think he  was in the  wrong profession.
Maybe he  wasn't, and just needed  to find his footing.  Maybe we need
more poet police officers, I don't  know. But I think, rather, that it
would be better  if he got out  and did something else  with his heart
and mind. Maybe he already has.