Low Life

A compressed attack on official power, where procedural language and professional irony become part of the same ugliness.

'Low Life' is a tight, indignant sketch of prosecutorial power: what 'Amounts to disguesting' is the 'Distriet Attorny's' and 'there professional / irony they think is work'. The poem reads their toughness as performance - 'Certain not tough' - and names the real engine as 'the horrible / dream, that if you / did not do it', closing on 'a desire / not to let the process / go through / At least / Without a fight'. The title's 'Low Life' lands as accusation pointed upward, attaching the gutter label to the office rather than the accused.

The piece works by inversion. 'Low life' normally names the defendant, the street, the underclass, but here it is the District Attorney's irony that 'Amounts to disguesting', so the moral hierarchy of the courtroom is flipped. The crucial knot is 'the horrible / dream, that if you / did not do it' - the fear of convicting the innocent, or the prosecutor's untroubled willingness to push forward regardless - which the closing lines answer with a refusal to 'let the process / go through / At least / Without a fight'. That ending is ambiguous in a productive way: it can be the speaker's vow to resist a rigged process, or his bleak contempt for the very idea of due process. The source spellings 'disguesting', 'Distriet Attorny's', and 'there professional' are preserved as written; their roughness gives the complaint a vernacular, unlawyered authority that matches its subject.