Burning

It's like I'm trapped, I can't get out/
Blackin out, no exit, ain't no backin out/
The work badgers how? Too calm to be a nervous wreck/
But I flirt with ends, the merciless wretch in the church of death/
It churns my chest, spurns my rest, this discerning hex/
Vermon breath is all I taste when I sense its pernicious step/
Life is stagnant; death a magnet/
When I'm burning up this fast I can only enter ashes/
Deliver lashes, sever gashes, half-content with the practice/
There's no body alive who remembers what vanishes/
Tethered appendages; tendons are pendulums/
Tending to apprehend the tension pent up in them/
Testing the palanquin carrying the weight of my soul/
But the driver won't wait on my soul, wasteful and sole/