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