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You Know / Anthony Gedell

Sitting there making it all about him

Pretending that this earth isn’t hollow

Superficial sorrowful pleasures manufacturing peace

How about only sobriety from pain

And can it just be argued away

This soul is only borrowed 

He’s trying to keep the drama discreet but it’s disheartening 

Looking away from the wreckage by those blinding summer flurries 

No one cares to see we just might be sinking

Playing catch-up with these last-ditch amends

Leaves him thinking

How is he to go on breathing when he can’t stop the bleeding

Let’s keep pretending

Memories of those seppuku butterflies she blossomed

He doesn't think she knows

Just exactly what she took from his soul 

It’s insane 

That we make it 

This love actually from nothing

He’s feeling a bit weary   

She says she’s blameless 

It tangles him a bit speechless

Not even the waves make a sound 

Disappointed they’ll leave this earth without one last kiss

The first in the dirt

Crashing bones and that paper tree

Digging it up his head sails north laughing before bowing his face to it

The more he pushes through as though he needs this he can’t find a reason that implies a worth

You might wonder how he can lie on his back and call it quits with this knife breaking skin

What he sees now is this heartbreak is bigger than she or him

Comprehending suicide through fleeting images

Can just about taste the bullet

The best revenge comes from no one knowing it

Made enough spectacle of this dark moment

Dearest, he is gone to this saga of everlasting suffering

The grief swung back on him with a vengeance

Every sunset resembles bloodshed

This is all his fault he knows it

Don’t write him off just yet

He’s doing fine penning that story

A good’ol boy pulling himself up by his bootstraps failing to mend his heart

He lets himself down with an unsound mind

Dying alone forgetting every prayer, oh the winter he knows

So take his worst intentions and his words for their worth

Made him feel he has no purpose

Questioning his reason for being 

What changed, it was all worth the affliction  

Starting to feel her slip away

He hates that it feels like he’s been here before

Knowing what’s good in her will forever be the best part of him 

He can’t let her go

When he sees her again she won’t be alone 

Deserved much better than him 

Don’t be afraid, darling, he thinks under a sky sifting more than the sea,

You’re really quite wonderful

He’s left chasing hate 

On her way up Jacob’s Ladder 

He knows he’ll see her face when he resides in that dark and lonely corner

Fantasizing about that tomorrow

Where it was always her hand in his 

Them against the world 

She is divine 

All good things come to an end 

For him it was always teetering and on the line

Repeating these degenerative cycles over and over again 

Trying to quit blaming people 

Just stopped falling in love instead

A decision lingering to breathe in at the bottom of this cold river

Bottomless faith in words as deeds and foxhole prayers useless poetry

Letting the wound close with that loop

Filling his lungs with any smoke

The only knot he’d tie the noose

This Old Testament lecture on how she walked away and took everything

There was this moment you see 

Just this guy alone and forever that way, isolated for good reason 

Atop it all and questioning

He is so low 

Has to drink himself to death so that he can remember hope’s touch

Rehabilitation period is over

Here’s to chasing it with apocalypse  

You look like shit, they say 

That’s ignorant 

What he sees 

He’s shooting for death and documenting mindlessness ahead of the curtain 

We are at stake to lose everything 

He still cries thinking on her, her arms calling

Despite this he doesn’t feel a thing  

It’s a certain bankruptcy of the human heart 

Everything in a life made uncertain 

Driving through the Verrazzano 

Felt like entering her 

And endlessly driving off of it 

Taking on that water thresher 

He’s left drowning without a rope

There’s a murder inside his soul 

Sure in need of another blonde in a minute 

Losing her was like wasted youth 

Where’s the exit sign to this past life 

His own feels plagiarized

Don’t let this foolishness cloud the only judgement of her 

She as a bride will be peak biblical beauty of a human being

A lottery without the stones he casted

Always been a parable for demise 

Starving as he feeds

His pessimism a knowing 

They didn’t care to listen

The paranoia is unsettling

Dwelling on the other side of the moon

Where even her shadow crawls forever

He is done with people

She waited on the right thing and gave it a universe  

It’s all he can see 

This loss consuming  

Vices are softening the ways of first touches

He’s breaking away towards new pastel 

Incendiary and falsified 

Here’s another poem for her 

Another postponed suicide, the French said 

He can’t tell the difference between an axe to grind or a night to cave 

Written in irrelevant ash

Ready to leave it all behind, was it even real?

Everything he has left to say is in vain

Looking for closure cruelly scratching at scars

He cannot fight it enough

At the very least he had love once

Caught between church bells and siren song 

There will be a warrant left sifting the abyss

What grave will be made of this world? 

What grave can be made of him?

It’s hard to accept how afraid he’s become

A piece of him gone and completely erased

Tracking his existence to what he once found

Blinded by these difficult truths

Even though they are burned keep those pages by your side

Wait for him and just stay

Sick to death of being alive

Done with it

When did it come down to one last cigarette?

Being this old young

The fire won’t catch, a match won’t spark

High wind he can’t breathe

Tossing away the nicotine he falls to his knees everything darkening defending these small and spazzing flames

All that gale turning at odds with this translation of light.


/


ANTHONY GEDELL writes from New Jersey publishing in Hobart, Poverty House, Variant, Revolution John, Punk Noir Magazine, and Bull. His debut novel, Love Lies in the Throes of Rhetoric, is slated for release October 22nd, 2024.




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