Poem: When We Woke Up To Find Out We’d Been Burgled

the first
relief was that our
toddler son hadn’t
heard any noise, hadn’t
walked down the hall,
hadn’t known it had
happened.

They’d broken in
while we slept, taken
phones and computers,
iPods and wallets – all
our cards, some loose
change and they’d scattered
a tin of guitar picks about
the place.

(The tiny tin would later
be dusted for prints – they’d
obviously hoped it might
have weed or whatever).

I’m saying ‘they’ because
we found out it was a three-man
team.

One guy doing the burg, one
fencing the stuff and a computer
wizard stealing all the data and passwords
and hiding them in the cloud or whatever.

My second thought was – haha, fuck yas, my
laptop lasts about 10-15 minutes max when
unplugged.

Third thought was the relief that they’d left
the car keys – if they’d grabbed them they
could have pressed the button to easily find
the car and that would have left us totally
stranded.

With a car I could take my kid to the zoo, pretend
it was just another day – even look at the monkeys
and lions with him rather than staring at my phone.

So that’s what I did. And when it was nap time
I got the cops to come and do dusting for footprints
and fingerprints and ask questions and stuff.

Later that night I had a DJ set and no one steals
vinyl, too heavy, too niche, so I carried on like
nothing had happened and did the gig. (And the
in-laws came and sat with my wife and my kid).

Everything that was burgled was replaceable.
It was fucking annoying. And I lost some classic
songs on the iPods that I can’t be bothered digging
for again – hundreds of Bob Dylan bootlegs and
Miles Davis rarities, but I don’t really need those
again. I lost about 14 months of writing – at a guess.
Most of the decade and a half of publishing was backed
up but not all. And yeah, I got a few judge-y comments
and messages about how that was my own fault.

(Thanks a lot).

It wasn’t nice being burgled.

But the police did an amazing job – of updating us, of
even finding and returning some of our stuff. And of
catching the crooks. When I thanked the main guy
he tipped his hat back like a cowboy
and muttered some trash about, “that’s the good thing, our
job is to catch bad guys. And today we did it. We caught
the bad guys”.

What a cock, I thought. (I mean cop).

The bad guys that got caught were responsible
for dozens of burglaries, three in our street that night.
And several across suburbs over a few weeks.

What a bunch of cocks.