The Police Would Silence Me, But I Will Not Be Silenced, No, Not Until Death: My Ghost, That Of Ray F. Gricar Haunt Police Guilty Minds Poem by Dennis Ryan

Monday morning, April 29, 2024 at 8: 10 a.m.

"The rest is silenced."
—Hamlet's final line, spoken to Horatio, in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, first performed in 1599.

The police would silence me, but I will not
be silenced, not silenced until death, my final
breath; they would isolate me from my fellows,
my brethren, but I will not be isolated despite police
quid pro quos in Cary and Raleigh—"You tell on us,
and we will kick you out of the places you like to go,
you haunt", they tell me through the silence, through
covert action, but, in truth, I haunt them, strike fear
in every police hearts this side of Greensboro—they
know as I know. I am a ghost, the truth-teller, the tell-
it-all ghost—not unlike Ray Gricar's—that haunts police
dreams; and it is our ghosts who abduct, disappear, murder
and bury police in hidden graves as they did Ray's corpse,
perhaps somewhere in the vicinity of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.