Psychomachia

There’s no cigarette or masochistic bromide
that can deflect the present’s grotesque poison,
the festered spite and bitter
that rots my long-cherished proclivity
towards tenderness.

My fragmented rectitude
is shrapnel in the hands of anyone
blind enough to come close.
My tongue is out to kill
and I’m brandishing knives
with demonic finesse,

and there’s no valor
or beacon of righteousness 
to disarm me.

I’m making offers on the altar
of solipsistic nihilism
with a velocity that
would have terrified my conscience
before the passionless intoxicant
infiltrated every last capillary.

Mental hemisphere frozen
in full solar eclipse.

Glacial indifference as frostbite
discolors my skin and soul and
closes in on my heart.

I’m beating these impotent fists
against the last wall standing,
begging whatever dismantled trace still breathes
to succumb to anything

but apathy.