My Rhyming Argument With a Traffic Cop
He stopped me for speeding; we settled the fine in couplets.
Officer Delgado clocked me doing fifty-three in a forty, and I made everything worse by rhyming at him.
I should explain the rhyming. When I get nervous, I speak in verse. It is not charming. It is a malfunction. It started in third grade, when I had to recite a poem at a school assembly, froze, improvised two lines that accidentally rhymed, and got a laugh so warm that my brain decided, permanently, that rhyme equals safety. Job interviews, first dates, turbulence at thirty thousand feet: my mouth finds couplets the way other people find their car keys, badly and in a panic.
So when the red and blue lights filled my mirror on Halstead Avenue at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, and a tall officer with a flashlight asked for my license and registration, what I actually said was, “I know that I was speeding and I know that speed was wrong. The light was turning yellow and the yellow felt too long.”
The flashlight did not move. Moths spiraled through the beam. Somewhere behind us his radio muttered about a stolen bicycle on Fourth Street.
“Sir,” he said. “Are you being smart with me?”
“No, officer, I promise, it's a nervous thing I do. My mouth starts making couplets when I don't know what is true.”
He stared at me for a long time...
Then the flashlight swung to the passenger seat, where the evidence sat in plain view: a spiral notebook with OPEN MIC, SIGN UP BY 7 scrawled across the cover, and beneath it a fan of printed poems, all of which had been read aloud an hour earlier to nine people and one bartender who kept the baseball game on mute out of what I choose to call respect.
“You're a poet,” he said.
“A bad one, officer. Ask the bartender.”
He clicked the flashlight off. And under the streetlight, with the moths going wild above us and my registration trembling in my hand, Officer R. Delgado of the Northeast Precinct leaned down to my window and said, “The radar gun is honest, and it puts you at the scene. But blaming yellow traffic lights? The weakest rhyme I've seen.”
I want to be precise about this moment, because nobody ever believes me.
He rhymed back.
Meter and everything. He landed on that last word like a man stepping on home plate after a slow, smug trot around the bases.
“Officer,” I said carefully, “did you just...”
“Here's how this goes.” Normal voice again. Cop voice. “You tell me why you were doing fifty-three, and you tell me in couplets. You make me laugh once, honestly laugh, and you drive home with a warning. You give me one lazy rhyme, one 'heart' and 'apart,' and I write you up for every dollar.”
There is no chapter in the driver's manual for this. I looked up at the moths... The moths offered nothing.
My first attempt was a disaster: “I sped because the open mic had left me sick at heart. The audience of nine kept me and dignity apart.”
“You went straight for 'heart' and 'apart,'” he said, wincing like I'd stepped on his foot. “Strike one.”
“The bartender kept baseball on while I read out my best. My stanzas lost to extra innings. You can guess the rest.”
“Better. Sad, though. Sad isn't funny.”
I took a breath. I thought about the drive... the actual reason... the thing I hadn't said to anyone. “I read to nine drunk strangers who did not applaud or boo. I sped because the silence took the passenger seat too.”
He didn't laugh. The radio crackled about the bicycle again and he reached up and turned it down, which I understand now was a significant gesture.
“That's not funny either,” he said. “That's just true.”
Then he walked back to his cruiser, and I sat there rehearsing how I'd explain the fine to my landlord, and when he came back he was not holding a ticket.
He was holding a notebook of his own.
Fat, rubber-banded, corners gone soft as bread.
He writes on the night shift, he told me. Between calls, hood of the cruiser, dashboard light. His wife Marisol used to read every page with a red pen and no mercy, and she was right every time, and she died two Marches ago, and he had kept writing anyway because stopping felt like a second funeral. Every June he wrote her an anniversary poem. He had written this year's three weeks before he pulled me over. It was sitting in the notebook with nobody on earth assigned to read it.
“Read it to me,” I said. “I'm legally required to stay.”
So at midnight on Halstead Avenue, a traffic cop stood under a streetlight and read a poem to a stranger he had just pulled over. He read badly, in a flat cop cadence, like he was giving testimony. It was about making her side of the bed every morning and then not being able to sleep on either side. It was better than all ten poems at the bar that night, and I'm counting mine as three of them.
When he finished, the moths were still going... and neither of us said anything for a while.
I told him what I knew, which isn't much. I told him I enter a monthly poetry contest and lose with tremendous consistency and enter again anyway. I told him there's a community wall where strangers read strangers at two in the morning and leave comments like people lighting candles. He shrugged and said poetry wasn't police business.
Then he tapped his pen on the warning slip and said the thing I think about every time I drive at night.
A ticket tells you what you owe. A poem tells you what it cost.
He wrote me the warning. On the back, in block capitals, he had added: WARNING ISSUED FOR WEAK RHYMES. PAID IN FULL.
I'd like to say we became friends, but that's not what happened. What happened is better and stranger. Four months later, scrolling the wall the way I do when I can't sleep, I found a poem posted by an R. Delgado, Northeast Precinct, titled “Marisol Reads the Night Shift.” Fourteen lines. The red pen was in it. The made bed was in it. He had written straight at the grief instead of around it, which is the whole trick, and it took him two years and one traffic stop to do it in front of people. Forty-one strangers had left comments. One of them just said, “My husband was a cop. Thank you.”
I read that comment maybe thirty times.
People at parties love funny encounters with police stories, so I tell this one, and it gets laughs in the right places, the couplets, the moths, the strike one. Then it goes quiet at the end... every time, the way Halstead Avenue went quiet when he read.
I keep the warning slip folded behind my license, block capitals facing out. I drive forty on that road now, exactly forty. And once, passing that streetlight around midnight, I swear I saw someone standing under it with a notebook, writing, and I did not slow down to check, because some poems you're not supposed to interrupt.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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