Salute

By: Gildae

My footsteps are the gunshots,
Ringing out a last salute,
To the self-sacrificing little boy inside me.
I walk with purpose, thin as ice,
To the gallows of my own device,
With some sham of a sense of closure in my mind.
The echoes turn to voices,
Screaming, ‘All I want is freedom!’,
But the request goes unrequited once again.
A crime of treason without repentance,
Invoking this tragic death sentence,
Who would have thought the innocent could betray?
The naive and pure of heart have died,
The tears of hope run forever dry,
This is the poison is all that’s left for me to breathe.
Now in this cage, I’ve closeted myself,
The fear bringing shame near palpable,
Who would have thought that it would come to this?
That desire might be eternally lost,
In the nebulous category of deception,
That love might ever be a word to be abhorred?
Reality then transports my dreams,
On the tip of an angel’s wing,
To this nightmarish dystopia of dead emotions and false smiles.
The pathology of my condition,
Is as ambiguous as the description,
Of the lost boy’s smile and of his laughter.
All these things have been purposefully forgotten,
Destroyed for the pretence of progress,
Abandoned like forever, consciously.