So close

to a reclusive keeper

of memories, of wrongs

Shuffling among the forgotten objects

Placeholders for the barely living:

anonymous empty

water bottles, hollow and crumpled

Become the jury

Old newspapers still swaddled in

Their plastic rain protectors

Told to be 

Witnesses or spectators

Instructed to rise 

As a one-armed nutcracker assumes the bench

Rag doll court reporter records the proceedings 

Mr. Vinegar prosecutes while

the defense attorney was appointed from among the 

A pantheon of generic

Happy Meal toys.

But the victims are living songbirds

Twittering in the disheveled

cage of my heart of course

Always re-animating  dried bones-

Off-kilter, neglected, wrongs

Will inexorably be

Radically, fundamentally transformed

When the true King

Calls them back

To life