New Years Tribunal

Four gather together
defender
prosecutor
Judge
executioner
six chambers filled
though only one
may be needed

Case to be pleaded
against screaming
voices within
all judgments final
no appeals
no reconsiderations.

Trial, Parole Hearing
is it one or the other
or both and the same?

Sentencing
one more year
in life
or end of life –
acquittal
a stay of execution
and one more year
of life
or freedom
from life.

Which is it
to be?

Execution
end of hope or
hope for freedom
granted?

Life
cursed
incarceration or
exquisite gift?

Which is it?

Is it one or the other

or
both and
the same?

Are THE facts
only stories
fabrications
meanings
created
formed
and imagined
from deafening
mental noise

or echoes of
those voices
lost
in reason?

Can a trial be convened
if neither
Accusers
Prosecutors
or Judges exist?

All like static
between channels
on an aged television.

Faces seen
and voices heard
hallucinated from
a noisy cacophony

by one exquisitely
creative mind.


A mind
imagined also
from the noise.

So a trial was convened
black and white speckled
static
each arguing their
case
vanishing
as fast as they appeared
replaced by more
and more
equally vanishing
specks
like bubbles
in a pot of
boiling water
rising to a surface
bursting into
unconsciousness.

Music from the
silent
void
all
that remains

all
that
ever was.

Music orchestrating
dancing of
innumerable parts
of the indissoluble
One.

Stepping onto the
dance floor
I hear one
last fading
speck whisper

“Don’t try to explain it,
you will only look
like a fool.”