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 A child stumbles from the wreckage holding his salvation The trigger to cessation 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