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The Way Down / Anthony Gedell

Another day coming home

Carrying an internment camp

Growing desperate for that dirty bomb

Confetti souls

So that the children will see

Me go

In a blaze of color

Because they are all being erased

I’m going to know what’s inside you

Witness to a murder

Every night

In her company

Eyes like craters

Empty and mined so deep

Only running for sleep

Self-murdering gypsies

Something like a masterpiece

Dizzy deep inferno

Trembling blind

With nothing left to sacrifice

No one and nothing to amend

And no old friends

All the eateries with the owner’s name

Never match the mouths of those who feed

A spectacle

Pregnant sick silhouettes

On the verge of giving burnt

Invitations

Thank you to those in this life

Shown a misery

Worth documenting

Loving the way a gravestone loves

Dumpster class

Constant cold state of exhaustion

Every greener pasture burns

Winter changes

To harsher climates

Archaic landfills of limbs brittle and bare

A culture of cruelty

Everyone an object of competition vector

In tongues

The father lies more than the ghost

We did it only in the dark

Knowing the family would not care

Barely notice her gone

We just give ourselves to anyone

They were waving scaled pelt

War torn souls

Snake eyes or no eyes

Iconoclasts we remain in the bedroom, wreaking gentle havoc

Now I’m out here looking for deeds

While you look for new anatomies

Clapping gunfire over heavy sweat

Strangers not to an unwilful exit

You howled so loud in all that lace

With the windows open

We couldn’t move when it was all said and done

Attending funerals day by day and not by trade

Draw the shortest bones to see who gains a sailor's grave

Can the ocean hold more bodies than land

You don’t know how hopeless we are

I can see why you would lie

To yourselves

Because you bred these handicapped deformities

Who will continue this inbreeding facilitating

The dreamers become unbelievers

A single herd

How can we live like that

Abbreviated agendas operating in smoke as foreign to us

Our impossible sadness

We would simply talk about the things we didn’t care to talk about

Until we become satires of ourselves

And unrecognizable perceptions

Look at me look at me

But there ain’t nothing to see

Time plus exposure equals catastrophe

Those that we love and who love

Brought about great diminishing returns

With nothing going on outside of this irritable metronome

A ticking timebomb all my life

No real sense to a countdown

Wheeling of this human heart

Laboring on our behalf through that wire cage into that dark oubliette

Hold your head up high

Breaking my neck just to try

Do you understand what it’s like to watch it all come undone

Brick by brick

Trying to throw you a rope

Just brought about this curtain close

And tightened our collective noose

There will be no man to pull at your feet

This will worsen and will never get any better

You heard it here first

Pack your things

Oh amazing mass grave

Welcome to the way down

It won’t be long now

We look so good with this catastrophizing glow

At the very least we are without pride

There’s an exit sign over that fruit

The end is now

And love is not the way out

It’d always been set to expire

You are beginning to look ominous

Started to think about our time together as a haunting

Stuck between wrath and wickedness

You know we all got our problems

Mine ended up just being broke bottles

Built this glass Church down this pebbled front

All the way to deeper rock bottoms

Every angel sordid and drunk

Gone to sleep with every priest.



/



ANTHONY GEDELL writes from New Jersey, publishing a story and poetry in Hobart, poetry in Punk Noir Magazine, and poetry in Poverty House. His first novel, Love Lies in the Throes of Rhetoric, is slated for release in the spring with Michael Dolan at Winding Road Stories.

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