Therapy Bits

I walk through the courthouse doors—
or what’s left of them.
They hang like tired lungs,
breathing dust instead of air,
breathing history instead of hope.

The marble floor, once proud,
buckles under the weight of forgotten verdicts.
The judge’s bench leans,
as if ashamed of what it has seen—
too many truths swallowed whole,
too many lies polished into evidence.

I stand before the cracked seal of justice,
its scales uneven,
its blindfold frayed at the edges.
When I speak, my words echo—
not with power, but with hunger.
They fall into the fissures of the room,
where other pleas have gone to die.

The gavel rises like a ghost’s fist
and comes down soft,
barely stirring the papers scattered like fallen feathers.
The clerk coughs,
the ceiling sheds another layer of paint,
and justice—
that beautiful, impossible promise—
drifts through a broken window,
escaping into the daylight
that no longer bothers to enter here.

I leave the way I came:
empty-handed,
my heart stamped with silence,
my footprints fading in the dust
of what was once the law.