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