The table isn’t a table
It’s judgment laced with chain
A throne room for your holy, satanic ritual
We sit in a cold formation
disciples with polished weapons, grips wrapped in leather,
just as you asked.
With a man who does not speak
to beckon gravity like a servant.
His hands move with surgical precision.
Mannerisms are love letters to order in this prison.
Glasses lifted, tilted, and immediately returned,
like every drop in the vessel has to beg to be earned.
Never waste your motion.
Even hunger bends politely.
His glasses reflect like silver
slender, handsome frames with glass enslaved for your vision.
They resemble window railings,
not to keep your world out
but to keep you in.
Behind them reside your unblinking eyes.
It’s a dining table to you,
but a battlefield to me,
where even the cruelest predators converse like prey.
He surveys our table like a person with a menu.
You can trace micro-hesitations in my jaw,
the pitch of voice before I speak.
You can predict my next sentence
before the thought forms in my skull,
and you’ll let me believe it came willingly
like I chose it.
I didn’t.
I’ll always recognize your methods
and forms of expression.
That’s the part that chains me
to your crime scene.
I am nothing if not
a creation of my father.
I know the thrill of anticipating the move
a shift in your rhapsody tone,
a fracture in your Da Vinci posture,
the quiet tremor before surrender.
But no siren song can betray me now.
I was raised in the shadow of your bastard king,
a disciple orbiting your unblinking colossus.
You become an eye
not divine and never merciful,
but unwaveringly watchful.
I learned to read your room
before the alphabet knew meaning in my books.
I learned silence is the most efficient strategy.
He who speaks first
becomes meat for you to cannibalize.
You don’t need to kill.
You can alter a trajectory in your ecosystem.
Lock a man in a room with a charlatan
and he’d return a convert of your greatest embellishments.
He’d strip the meat off his bones with a dull blade
if it means he can call his devotion enlightenment.
You can laugh,
but even that is manufactured.
Feel your skeleton from the inside out
and I can feel the architecture of him
and map it almost perfectly
to my ribs.
Hands folded at the head of the table
and you look almost benevolent.
Hands folded like a statesman.
You’d make a great politician.
Cut the air around supporters with substances,
thin it with calculation,
and take a vow in court that it’s oxygen.
And as the linen of the table caught the light,
I understood the final shape of your operation.
You will never be called a predator.
You’ll be called disciplined.
Brilliant.
Unwaveringly principled.
Every victim will write their own suicide notes
framed as apologies.
And when the eulogies are spoken in your church,
your name will beckon to believers at the top
polished and untouchable.
You need only a wave of your hand
and the priest will send you to heaven.
Paradise is a place for saints,
and everyone believes you were nothing but.
The victims and I will sit
at the margins of the page
disheveled footnotes
in the obituary
of those who mistook
your abuse for love.