Albuquerque ain’t Miami
but it’s close
Warm scent of prey in the air
Looky at that one over there
Asking for it, no begging
I’ll be doing her a favor
Putting her out of her misery
And cleaning up this town
It’s what I do
when the sun goes down
*
If the meth heads can hide
So can I
No need for roads
In this wasteland
Far from prying eyes
Only my cold ones
Twinkling like stars
As the lights in yours
Fade to black
Another red notch
*
Forty and counting States
When I hit fifty
How will I celebrate?
Double feature?
Man? Child? Family?
These onesies begin
to bore.
I need more
than a whore.
Profilers will freak!
It was uncomfortable putting myself into the perspective of a human predator. My training and experience is in criminal justice, which involves reading lots of police reports, risk assessments, etc. on extremely disturbed and dangerous individuals. One commonality between all of them are intricate rationalizations used to justify their actions, no matter how heinous. I don’t like to think of there being individuals out there who go from state to state killing, but I know they are out there.
Just a word on what seems to be a media fascination with serial killers: I see the morbid fascination as a symptom of a sick society. Why have serial killers become glamorized?
image: A drawing by Richard Ramirez aka “The Night Stalker”
Photograph courtesy of Serial Killer Ink. Please note, you can follow that link to a Rolling Stone article dated 8/9/19, entitled, “Inside the Murderabilia Machine: How macabre artifacts became a booming industry,” written by Elizabeth Yuko.
Bjorn is today’s host of dVerse. Bjorn says:
As usual in MTB I would like you to go out of your comfort zone and change the perspective. You can either start from a poem you written before and change its perspective, or simply write from a perspective you are not used to. When you have done that post the poem and include a short note on how what you felt when going out of your comfort zone.
Tao Talk 
Chilling.
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Sorry, Len 😦
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Agreed.
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What a change of perspective! Why give a warning though? Life doesn’t come with warnings, or so I told someone who suggested that I add a warning before posting a poem about the suicide of a friend. Yeppers, freak the profilers out!
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The warning is to make the reader aware it’s going to be emotionally intense. It doesn’t hurt, and it can help if a reader is at risk for emotional overload.
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I understand. Still….what I wish people would give warnings about is cruelty to animals or the starving ones. To be honest, I don’t care that much about humans, just the animals.
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I wish I could say I don’t understand where you’re coming from, Toni.
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I agree with Toni; no needed for the warning. As a reader I leap into every poem fresh-faced, eager to feel emotions, to be seduced or frightened, to be angry or saddened, to be joyful. Each of us are on a poetic adventure out here on the dVerse trail
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I understand that you and Toni don’t need the warning, but others might. This poem goes out to a lot of people, not just the dVersers. Please indulge me ok?
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Thank goodness you work on the other side of the law-the good side. I can never even begin to imagine what goes through the mind-or even the rationalisation in the mind of a serial killer. Well written.
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Thanks, Vivian. It’s probably best none of us dwell too long near the mind of one. We know enough about them right now to simply “take them out.” Out of society and out of contact with as many people as possible.
Also, I tried to make a comment at your blog on your poem, and it says “comments closed.”
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I shudder to think of what you have to read in those reports.
Oops – I certainly didn’t close my comments- must see what’s going on there. Thanks for letting me know!
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Putting yourself in their shoes and in their minds probably helps in your line of work, as scary as it seems. Thank you for your service. I agree there is too much of a morbid fascination with the macabre. We have crossed too many lines.
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Mary, thank you very much for your thoughtful comment.
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This is raw and dark and I admit scary but, poetry sometimes does shock the senses and you did this well.
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Truedessa, thank you much, couldn’t agree more on where poetry sometimes leads us.
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You’ve definitely caught a voice–I was reading recently about an old man who is now confessing to have killed hundreds of women, and this really reminded me of the feeling I got reading about him. It’s not a pretty picture. (K)
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hundreds???? I’d be interested in knowing how they caught him? One thing I’ve noticed about law enforcement and the justice system — not putting anyone down, just stating my experience with it — is that it often lacks a sense of urgency when it comes to taking serious criminals seriously. Think of all of those rape kits sitting in warehouses that never got tested. I know it’s only fiction, but that series, True Detective, shows the level of passion, dedication, and urgency it takes to catch the monsters.
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I looked it up…he’s actually confessed to 90, but they think there are more. Samuel Little. It’s a fascinating story. These are women living on the margins that no one but their families cared about, so the police didn’t do much to investigate their deaths, it’s shameful, but at least some of the families are getting closure of a sort at last.
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I just checked him out on wikipedia. Not a lot of detail there about how they caught him, but he was linked to so many and nobody put the pieces together 😦 The fact he drew pictures of them makes me sick.
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I read an article about the Texas cop that is still working on getting confessions…I’ll try to remember where and link it to you if I can.
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https://www.thecut.com/2018/12/how-serial-killer-samuel-little-was-caught.html
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Sorry, K, I just found your comment in my spam folder. Thank you for the link.
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I just finished reading the article. Thank you again. I admire everyone involved in working together to get this piece of filth locked up for the rest of his life.
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I agree. A dedicated group of people. So important to bring closure to the families too.
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I noticed someone in there said something about having a centralized database and I 100% agree. The weakness with it now is it is VOLUNTARY for the departments to add data. I did data entry way back when, so I know that it can be done relatively painlessly if you can develop the right forms with checkboxes. A data entry person doesn’t cost any department much money, but the value is worth much. After reading that article, I am convinced the person she interviewed is evil incarnate. And he’s been roaming virtually unchecked all of these years.
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There’s so much wasted technology that could be used for good. And yes, truly evil. Howe do these people come to be?
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Whoa! You really went to the dark side Lisa. That made me shiver 😕 So well written.
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Christine, thank you. The muse can lead to some dark places…
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Yes, she takes me down that road quite a lot!!! 🤣
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🙂
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I can’t begin to imagine how uncomfortable is was to put yourself in a serial killer’s shoes, Jade, and you took the exercise to the depths of darkness. Having experience of criminal justice certainly gives you the insight. I agree about the terrible thought that these killers move from state to state; that’s not so hard in a huge country like America, but it also happens in small places, like the UK. I can’t answer your question about the glamorisation of serial killers. I only read books about Jack the Ripper, the Moors murderers, and Fred and Rose West because I want to understand why they did what they did, how it was possible for them to go unnoticed, and why they weren’t caught sooner.
I think the scariest things in your poem are that the killer is ‘cleaning up this town’, the lines:
‘Only my cold ones
Twinkling like stars
As the lights in yours
Fade to black’,
and that he (or could it be a she?) is enjoying the spree.
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Writing this was taking my darkness to a deeper place and it was/is uncomfortable to put myself there, even in a poem. Kim, thank you very much for your comments. It is troubling to think they are everywhere on the globe, not just the US. I know they come in all genders, and there is no question some kind of compulsion drives them.
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That self-justification is really well done. You obviously know your stuff! It’s not a pleasant poem to read, but it works really well.
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Thank you, Sarah.
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Truly chilling Lisa. The thought that there are people out in this world that kill for pleasure is disturbing. But we see it more and more. Frightening to be sure.
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Yes, I see them, and the fascination with them, symptoms of a sickness in our society.
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Great (even if horrible) entering into another’s view. I also do not understand societies (all of them) obsession with violence — and 95% of the time it is obsession with violence against women.
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Thank you, Sabio. Patriarchy, consumerism, and competitiveness are 3 main culprits. Parents need to be very aware and sensitive to what they teach their children by thought and action. Rabid competitive sports for kids is a horrible way to get early conditioning going. On a similar, but different, subject, one of the things my sons (who are in their 30’s now) and their significant others like to do is play board games. As I’ve gotten into it more, I realize there are two main modes these games are designed to be played as. One is competitive, where it’s each player out to destroy/dominate the other players. The other is cooperative, where the players work together to combat an enemy/disaster/etc. There is a compelling need to make a societal shift from competitive to cooperative. Sorry to go on and on…
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Every single police officer I’ve ever met and become friendly with have all said a variation of this ” If you knew you walked amongst us, you’d never leave your house again”
Uck.
I felt so uncomfortable reading this because I know it’s true. So good job on creeping me out,lol. It’s such a fine balance, isn’t it? We need to understand, to try and get in the heads of these predators so we are aware and safe without glorifying them or making them celebrities. It’s tough.
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Lael, exactly. Even my working just with the juvenile offenders, there have been the ones I’ve come across that haunt me yet to this day. What haunts me more are their victims. To be for real for real, you must always be on your guard, even with the most “charming” stranger. I remember walking out to my car one day, which was parked across the street in an employee parking lot. A nice-looking man started walking up to me and said his car had a flat and he needed some help. That scene from a movie I watched years ago about Ted Bundy flashed in my mind, how he lured his victims to his car, and I immediately headed in another direction and pulled out my phone. He disappeared in an instant. You are SO right, be educated and be aware.
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a brave and powerful poem, Jade…it was uncomfortable to read, but, hey, I don’t read to feel comfortable…. the discussion about the “warning” is a bit beside the point…it’s a good poem and that’s what matters! JIM
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JIM, thank you for your comments and compliment.
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I wonder about the fascination… and actually the person you describe seems a lot like Jack the ripper… targeting prostitutes meaning that he can almost claiming to do something good, and avoiding to be found. I wonder if there are those who do it like this, going from place to place would most certainly make them very hard to find…
Maybe the fascination stems from the fact that we at least are sane compared to them…
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Bjorn, there are schools of thought on why prostitutes are so often chosen by serial killers, as you said. I admire any brave soul who tries to interview/study them. Even though they are a tiny percentage of the population, I think their risk to the rest of us is enough to do DNA testing on every child at birth and to have a global or, at the very least, national DNA database. This way any evidence left at the scene can be linked immediately to the killer. You may be right about the fascination.
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