A Poem with Cops in It

There shouldn’t be cops in this poem.
If we can’t be abolitionist in a poem, then where?
But it’s July and there are cops everywhere & yesterday
there was a beautiful balding man on west 14th,
stooping & sweating like Frank O’Hara, dead 
59 years this month & one can’t write a I-go-there,
I-do-this poem these days without a cop walking into it.
You see them & not just the usual places: not only subways &
buses & streetcorners & the deli &
they’re bigger than they used to be, too:
more jacked, more gear, more pockets for the gear:
waterbottles for warming summers in cargo pocket;
2-3 writing pads and 4-5 pens a piece,
belts with ten loops for flashlights, batons, mace,
so much gear you could almost miss the gun,
except for the way it flaps off their hips.
Sometimes there are two guns.
I wonder if they pick favorites,
if the left gun envies the right gun
when it gets touched.
Their shoes are different too:
darker & less dust than before &
the  haircuts are shorter; the ponytails slicker &
buns pulled tighter for the ladies.
 
Cops used to touch eachother & passersby,
but now they mostly touch water to their lips and
fingers to the inside of their vest and of course phone phone
phone & sometimes they joke, but mostly they’re bored.
Out of uniform, the people who wear these uniforms
may cook soup or change a diaper or learn to weld,
but cops do not do these things & the only time
their eyes light up is when talking about the non-cop time
to come: that distant kingdom. They whisper of sleep or television,
but mostly of the years till out. I got ten to go they’ll say, reverant,
like the prisoners they are, you got 15, right?
 
When we’d all been taken downtown in the bang-up bus
& they were lining us up after the sit-in long past midnight,
I listened as one cop did the math:
years in, years out. She shook her head, face suddenly
soft and sad, like she’d learned like her old dog’s kidneys
were too far gone. This ain’t it she said. One handcuffed comrade
pleaded for water on behalf of another. The holster bottle
crackled when the cop brought it to his lips.
Two sets of eyes moved upward, squinting at the moon. This ain’t it.