Panic Room

Lustrous lines obscured by opaque blinds
Frozen metacarpals tap tap tap the window glass
Syncopated staccatos with the broken clock
Synchronized with my post-traumatic ticks ticks
Talking to the space in the room that echoes back indiscernibly
To my disconnected self/self
It’s self-consuming, what's ensuing is my undoing
The nightly casualty of war

And it sounds like this: War, endless war

In my endless dance with entropy
I must rescind my sentience
The sickness that I know
Rearrange the disarray of disintegrated senses
Puzzle pieces, spectral splinters
of a soldier’s worn and tattered soul
In my endless dance with entropy
I must rescind my sentience
The sickness that I know

Machines of air looking down on us
The beasts of dust as we grapple heel and hand
Mud and sand, (blood red oil)
The chaff of the harvest
Converted to currencies of wealthy means
Stepping stones cut from our perforated bones
Riches are reaped beside our bodies
sown just to be thrown back again
And forgotten if we stumble in
Laid inside a homeless nest
Stuck with eager dirty needles
Shipped to an early steeple where boxes close
Descend with grace as you defend yourself
Both charitable and chaste
Praise me for my valor, lay me on a crimson tower
Justify my endless terror as my “finest hour.”
Treat me as a token to deceive the child
Whom we fatten for this scapegoat slaughter

I learned to fight; I learned to kill
I learned to steal
I learned that none of this is real
None of this is real
None of this is real
None of this is real

But there’s a war inside my head

Beleaguered by my breathing
Choking, screaming, heaving
Time drags me back to the desert
This is war
A child stumbles from the wreckage
Holding his salvation
The trigger to cessation, to end us all
I took a life that takes mine
Every quiet moment we collapse
Have you forsaken us?

All the darkness comes alive
Take my hand, drag me to the void