Moon at Half Past Noon

A hush, not of respect, but of a blade
unsheathed and held. The great hall holds its breath.
He walks the aisle. His step is slow, is heavy,
a soldier’s step, through dust and ash of towns
whose names are scars. He feels the weight and tremor
of every eye, a chill upon the air
that speaks of old verdicts and coming shame.
His shoulders bear an invisible burden;
this is the man who has seen the cost, and now
must sell it. He counts the steps—not his, but the script’s—
to seem a force of history, a thing he dreads to be.

Breathe from the ruin, the voice coils within.
Find the cold center. Walk from that dead star.
He lets their stares—the scorn, the fear, the pity—
prick at his skin, and notes them sharply: data, fuel.
“This one, the face for speaking of just fire.”
“That one, the collaborator’s patient smile.”
He gathers them, a harvester of stones.

His jaw is tight, a nervous hinge. He works it,
feeling for the afterimage of a tremor, a self
that might still plead. He forces stillness there,
and fills the space with basalt, not with marble.
The body must believe first, comes the whisper.
The mind’s a lagging, traitor-slow disciple.
He feels the slight, familiar weight his hands
have always been, and makes them something else—
not hands, but instruments of state, to rest
upon the polished wood as on a coffin-lid.

A memory—inoculated, sharp as a splinter—
the script-page’s words: “child,”
“collateral,” “necessary cost.”
He built this memory in a silent room,
brick by brick, until its wall eclipsed his sun.
Now, grief ignites behind his eyes, a fire
that is not his; it is a crafted key,
a perfect, weaponized and focused sorrow.

This is the final stride. The great unmaking.
The I, the he, the script, the curated rage—
The synapses blur, then solder shut.
A new circuit completes: pure, clean purpose.

And then.

A click. A settling. The soul’s hum dies.

He mounts the dais. He does not touch his notes.
He plants his feet, and where a haunted man once stood,
his body towers—not in height, but in mass—
a dark star bending the light of the room.
He lets the silence stretch, a bowstring drawn
to its breaking point. Then, his gaze lifts.

It does not scan. It subjugates.
It moves across the monarchs and the envoys,
the ilk of power, and finds them all—
without exception—wanting. It is the look
a glacier gives a mountain it intends to grind to dust.
There is no person there, only a principle: power.

And when he speaks, the voice is not a sound
that travels through the air, but a vibration
that begins beneath their feet, a deep cored tremor.

“THE DEVIL WAS HERE, YESTERDAY.”

The words are thunder in a cloudless hall.
The glass of water shivers on the rostrum.
“AND YOU…” (the pause is a tectonic plate shifting)
“…YOU ROSE TO GIVE HIM A CHAIR.”

The assembly does not stir. It is frozen.
They do not hear a speech. They feel the advent.
They are not listeners. They are the fault line.
And he is the earthquake, and the script, the verdict.
The voice in the world is now his own.