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Atlas At Last

Written by  Michael Anzuoni

The City: Here we are digits. The seemingly empty void in a mother's stomach. The character sucked from within us and into an ooze waiting in a white desert. We pray through a tin can and string and we are all drunks listening to the radio naked. Cold and calculated, we are hustled onto trains and made into iron and sulfur scenes. Thin wire pierces the cloth that adorns me and the blood trickles through, a final reminder that I am alive before I taste the steel of assimilation.

The Town: On the hill on the streets on the iron plastered sunrises gated by the moon and stars and flailing mountains we'll stand and I'll be right by you even when I lie naked and tempted by a hero or villain or even just a friend in masquerade I'll be there, don't believe your stone idols and envious whims when I all have is for you and you're all I have, it's lunacy or is it just a brilliant shining emblem of what collapses on the steps leading up to your oak? Leaves are misleading, calendars are blasphemy and even though the sun will set its light doesn't burn. just like the lantern hung for you knock on the door and let him in.

The Sky: A spiral towards heaven like the ghost smoke from an ominous chimney pours from the growing smile that stretches from the pale face to the blonde hair and into a garden, the skyscrapers beside the canyon and the lingering poison and stench in my mouth as the words are whispered. Apologies to somebody. Except it all wasn't there, the machine was cogs and slings and voices and clocks and they all turned nowhere and the kept moving across the world on the plateau.

The Plain: Inspirited fires whisp towards Westward expansion and hungry peasants make the march towards the gray fields and they are holding hands, praying for windbreak and rainfall. She comes in clean from the dirt and somehow is hoisted high onto a chariot driven by a single man and he is off. He is gone he is never coming back and he is content. If I could will my way into his chest I would.

The Forest: Among the floatsam and the jetsam of the static ground, the leaves whistling I lay down and carved a tomb around the circle, demanding nourishment from it's maw. Bent down like a maiden, I suckled on the rocky teat and it forced the keys to the Earth down my throat and the trees kept signing to me. Oh how those limbs twirled and lunged and never had I seen such limber lumber wink at me like they did, suspended in the sky as they lynchnman's assassin. What did they spell out? Oh god I want this amber sea to overcome me and let me drown in the embryonic fluids and devour the cells and become a farmer of tumors, a reaper of the sickles and cells. If only I could drown and if only I could come back to oblivion.

The Ocean: A thousand fountains of light and destruction are all the same and they all run the rim of the universe, the light you see is the grin from God's teeth and his splintering eyes that cut your body into a hundred vices and each one is different, each one more beautiful and insecure than the last and all you can bear to do is ask me why as you pound on the leaves and spiderwebs, clinging to the passion the fountains have extinguished with their brilliance. You are falling in an ocean and you cannot swim and the ocean is thick like the tears of a falcon or a saint, the rooster crowing as the axe hammers down on the only thing you've ever seen that was so beautiful. If only you learned how to swim.

The End: Long limber poetic lines drag on up and down until they criss-cross the entire globe and we fall into a slumber pocket, a dip in black. Ropes fall from the stars and the angels hang themselves and give us their hand. The enemies rise from the boiling lakes and deliver us rolls of parchment all screaming the same notes over and over again. All this happens in complete silence as we recover from the dip and stumble back into the Sun.

 

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