Starving mouths
Swollen vaults
And a sense of justice
Long reduced
To clerical abstraction
Processed daily
In crumbling annexes
And over-burdened bureaucracies
Where ink-stained drones
Mutter verdicts to empty rooms
In glass towers
Where corruption rises
Like a monument
To the failure of conscience
With trials
No longer requiring defendants
Just the whisper
Of unapproved hungers
Laws and language
Looping back on themselves
Trapping the innocent
In a maze of sanctioned belief
As we watch
Hollow-eyed and obedient
Convinced that salvation
Will be found in form 7b
Properly notarized
And wholly confessed to
Within a suffocating stillness
Where time sags like an old coat
And the dream of justice
Dissolves
With the stroke of a pen
