perugia shock

 Poetry by Dr David Anderson

A downcast girl in a striped grey sweater
Rises to her feet and asks to speak.
The hall is hushed
A long-haired legal slimeball slides from his seat and leaves the hall.
Does he at last feel pressure from those strikes
On victims he detests?
Or smugly pat his armour-plated breasts?
A girl was murdered and Amanda grieves
She tells of pain for family and self –
She was my friend! Each hour I feel for her
But we are victims too, Lele and I!
Outside the slimeball coward doesn’t hear –
His training is to turn the other ear,
To prosecute, debate, annihilate.

A bigger slimeball pats his balding pate
Harmless enough unless he holds your fate!
A blob of a baggy-panted reason you might think
Never a courtroom killer. Watch him slink
Outside while she speaks – what, for a lawyer’s piss?
Is there a chink in his armour? Mama Mia!
Or something else amiss?
He blubbers like a baby, gives me creeps;
Bless’d Virgin Croc, I fear he bites for keeps.

Sorry, Patrick, that you spent
Two weeks in prison. They made me speak your name.
I was harassed and tired, but sorry all the same.
They would not let me sleep.
I got another year for that! We aren’t to blame,
Lele and I, we did not kill her, but they’ve made us pay.
What makes Perugian prosecutors play
Malicious games with innocent young lives?
The hall is hushed, the downcast girl sits down,
We weep for all the evil, all the lies.
What will tomorrow’s papers say, why were they willing
To sell those lies to make an honest shilling?