Original Piece #1: Poem

NYC Nights

 

Patrolling the night,

A crime is born,

Turn on the lights,

Wail the air horn. 

Arrived on scene,

Suspect on the run,

Ten Thirteen,
“Put down the gun!”

In a rain of fire,

Backup arrives,

Check for a prior,

Everyone survives. 

Except for the one,

For which the call went out,

Realizes he’s done,

Blood flows like a spout.

N-Y-P-D,

F-D-N-Y,

Come help me,

I don’t want to die.

My poem talks about an NYPD officer who is working the night shift.  He recieves a call about a crime and responds to a man with a gun.  He gets into a gun fight with the man and backup arrives, but in the end, the officer gets killed by the criminal.  I used a couple of different conventions in my poem.  I used an ABAB rhyming pattern as well as 4 line stanzas.  The target audience is pretty much anybody, but I guess it's more geared towards people with a Criminal Justice background or education.  I used some information from my ethnography.  It shows some police procedures like checking for a prior crime, the NYPD code 10-13, which I talked about in my ethnography.  Also, this poem shows how in special circumstances, things don't go according to plan, which is something I learned in my interview.