Observations of a Courtroom

Author's Note: originally scratched on a lineless notepad sometime in May, 2007.

Your shoes step sticky on a shaved shag rug; the color is overchewed gum spit upon a sidewalk, left to leak the last traces of human moisture out onto the asphalt. The punitive puritan benches and schoolhouse chairs glow sickly green, reflecting the cheap fluorescents from even cheaper yellowy varnish. The dirt that perhaps once polluted that very same sidewalk has seeped beneath the polish and caught between the woodgrain, and now the varnish preserves and protects the dirt and wood alike: resin over rot, shellac on decay, a plexiglass case to display the unfamous entropy of the world.

Trappings of modernity are tenuously tacked on – microphones to make records while men make their mockeries; computers and copiers are small sleek monoliths that jut from the pink and yellow pollution and declare with a modest hum that the modern wheels of justice will not travel in miles per hour but in megahertz. All will bow to the binary.

In this limbo of time space and logic, the outside world and all who seek shelter in it will be cut in twain: black or white, sheep or goat, detention or liberty, life or death, guilty or not guilty.

Or, forever trapped here among icy robes and empty suits to face the interminable undeath of fluorescent light and varnish and old paint chipping off wrought-iron bars, each dilapidated portion of edifice a grim reflection of the process that they house: justice.