ASPHYXIUM ZINE

Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Poem: 'Parlour Tricks' by Alan Lisanti

Parlour Tricks
by Alan Lisanti

The echo chamber

Where words bounce around like rubber bullets in a padded room

Deflections and ricochets
The curious thoughts and the odd paranoia

The fear-driven premature mortality obsession
Of death like it's always breathing cold exhalations on my neck

Remnants of anxious rush coincided with my restlessness
Everything is never quick enough between point a's and b's
Should it subside if I breathe
Control spun dizzy and distorted by the atrophy

It centers around the lack of maintained moments
Where I wonder how far the damage has blown my hollow bones in vicious winds

Where the tides of calm are always just the waters churned
Where the whitewalls and swells dip and dive in extreme descents

This surface never tranquil and still in the dawn's fresh Sun

Beneath the depths to which the eyes can see
There's madness in a maelstrom
Anchors that sink like teeth into the bottom sands
Dragged endlessly by concrete shoes and weighted feet

Like metal on asphault
Where friction erodes the efforts they make to stand firm in the trenches of
What's best described as
Aquatic life of gilled marine mammals
With liquid singed lungs

Adaption: where you become triumphant over evolution's time lapses in slowed hours like clock hands soaked in molasses

And strained by the ticks and tocks
Of duties fulfilled endlessly
To where the gears tire out
And the days have gone numb

Trudge your tomb shoes through the countryside's loneliness

Civilization is an escapists best fitted suit of armour against the throes of isolation and the birth of stirred insanity

The classic depreciation of functional awareness
Symptomatic side effects of hopeless castaways
The voice and the mind's voices concentrated into one

Like split atoms in reverse
Conjoinment by confinement

Madness and doubts and desperation
All in this chorus in unison

Voids and vacancies plugged like holes with the thinking man's thumb

Questionable methods and extortions of tendencies
Drown in the ideal survivalists atmosphere

The oxygen has betrayed me now too
Just like determination and love

When the world stands on my chest
Pressure that tips the scales towards collapse

All in my head and imaginary
And it begs the question
How far can this go?

The calm precedes the storm
The prologue of synergies in the rabbit holes

The loose wheels of the rocket ship built with aluminum

The tin can prayers of human moths flying towards compactors

The scorched wings of Icarus

The scars of all brave fools
And the consequences of tragedies

Where they have tried the unthinkable

And some not lived to transcend their foolish bravery

Catch a bullet in your teeth and spit it out for all the rainy days

Now you can be houdini playing frisbee with ninja stars
And make your exit in a cloudy puff of smoke

Trust me when I say that my demons are quarantined
Not running rampant like a stampede of hooves

But what might it cost me to come out the other side of this?

Altered or...forever
As one

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