Law and order

 

They wake you in the morning put a flashlight in your eyes, dragging you and the bed sheets to the floor.

They strip off your bed clothes with a gun at your head.

You feel like dust already, you eyes itch, your mouth tastes of linoleum, and the newsprint from the morning headlines leaves images on your face, of heroes who are not your heroes in a country that used to be yours.

Someone takes your picture then asks about your wife.

You’re scared and say you’re going to call the police.

They say they are the police and they’ve come to bring you law and order.

It’s just not quite the law and order you had in mind.

One of them grabs your daughter as she comes through the door. You don’t see her, you just hear her scream, and then the muffled sound of tearing fabric.

Your guard just grins as he waits his turn, his eyes like x-rays as he looks in her direction.

You rise, they hit you, you rise again and they hit you until you stop trying.

They say they are Caesar’s heirs, and have every right to do what they wish with you, calling it Law and Order, when it is not your law and order, cuffing you to make you shut up even when your daughter moans.

Then, you see your wife in the door in the arms of one of THEM, that man’s hands going where no other man’s hands have a right, her eyes full of panic as she pretends she likes it.

They tell her to spit on you and she does. They tell her to smile when they take her to bed, mother and daughter locked in THEIR embrace as you watch.

Each curse you curse draws a blow from a revolver, uniformed men boasting of law and order you can not have.

You get no mercy, no bullet in the head yet.

They drag you out, lock you up, feed you bread if you’re lucky, make you work while telling you how free it makes you so that you get freer and freer every day until you drop, and when you cannot be any freer – that’s when they kill you.