How did you die? Were you ever alive?
Questions asked by a torpid fool
executing the sterile interrogation.
Capricious witnesses laugh in pain
as I sit, strapped by leather bands
to a frigid porcelain bench.
This is the bloodthirsty courtroom of innocence
translated into cadaverous endings.
What can a fool gain through conviction?
Perhaps the eradication of necrosis.
The fool views the substance as trivial nonsense.
His purpose is to convict me, the wraith,
the amenable child, the abject wretch.
A conviction that will never arrive,
led by a foolish prosecution that cannot rest,
as long as I, benighted and unredeemed,
lack power to loosen the fearsome leather bands.
Kerry Ann Herrmann
My father is terribly violent which instilled in me an incredible shame and self loathing. With this poem, I confronted that shaming and cruel voice that constantly haunted my thoughts. I named that voice "the fool" because of how foolish it was that my own voice became my accuser. In the end, I admit that I am the one who controls the leather bands, but will remain subjugated as long as I choose to remain powerless.