Struggling, seeking, sorting, salvaging: 

No Saint to Save—  

Building, breaking, blaming, bandaging: 

No Bliss to Miss—  

Dreaming, daring, despairing, damaging: 

No Dark to Daunt—  

Making, melding, masking, managing: 

When Matter is Batter—  

 

Tomorrow it’ll be The Yesterday, 

But yesterday it was The Tomorrow— 

The shears that will my future flay 

Are enshrined in my past sorrows. 

 

We all lose our minds a little now, 

Unless you’re one of the lucky lot—  

Where’s a tree with the Unrotted Bough? 

Where’s all the fruit that we forgot? 

 

We all lose our minds a little now—  

Attentions diverted by a bottomless slot; 

The arcade flashes and we wake up as mirrors 

No longer to be, and much less to bow— 

The self creeps away as the shiny grows nearer: 

We all lose our minds a little now—  

But Mine I’ve Lost A lot.  

 

A lot.  

 

A lot: Us.  

 

A Lot—  

 

—Us in the Bush of Birth, 

A Lotus loafing kindly worth. 

A Lotus overlooked again, 

Lo, tusk is in reign blindly. 

Lo, tusk in hand, lotus unmanned—  

Lo, tusk in hand we fight.  

Lo, tusk is sharp, lotus a harp—  

Lo, tusk in hand is might. 

Skin begs no; 

Kin cry woe! 

Lo, tusk in hand is might: 

Dismal the death; 

Malicious breath! 

Lo, tusk in hand is might—  

No matter wrong or right. 

 

I’m filled and I cannot reel release 

I’m filled with Us: Lot of unpeace 

Each one dares flash like lightning’s sire 

Gleamed and Glutted with unchaste desire—  

It drips from my lips, how grim, how feckless! 

Heathens can be when inventive and reckless 

They pry and they twist and the twist does persist 

Till limbs out of bent don’t know how to resist 

The rebels within Us that, browsing at sins, 

Build space for a Lot deep under our skins—  

 

Lost again, now lost a lot: Us Lot since long forgot 

We grew backwards, reversed right into rot 

So that wrong would find its slot 

A chance to delude the Precious Plot 

And claim peace as to what’s fought 

And demand war for all that’s naught. 

 

 

Us Lot adjust to backward life, 

Us Lot learn liability; 

If only by destructive means—  

Denial’s its own ability 

Delusion a distractibility 

Courted through the nights of farce 

That force tragedy down our throat 

Stifling what sparse sustainability 

Was left before the blustering bloat 

 

Lost and so I’ve made love to a howl 

Lost and so I’ve screwed raw a growl 

And so kneading notoriety into shapes of propriety 

And so bored collectively to flourish unexpectedly— 

O Sand! Slipped through hands and lost…  

O Sand! Its grains, the start of abundance! 

O Sand! Bounty for scavengers, at what cost? 

O Sand! To our perception an end, a redundance. 

 

We dream of dark horses dappled with light of strange forces 

Slithering from sight, chased in the night, caught not quite—  

Yet there’s still fight to incite to ignite to claim what’s right and leave the scraps for spite until we reach the height and invite the bright to burn our sight so we may excite in us the sprite the poets recite of the vicious delight in a relentless bite the kind to unite faceless fright and pointless plight—  

 

Let the concrete crumble 

Let the foundation rumble and tumble 

Fake a prayer with your flickering tongue 

For the Nothing Above to fix it all 

(If you cannot recognize O Sand  

slipping through your fingers, 

Perhaps you have drowned in it)— 

And we who claim to have found 

Before having begun to search; 

We must make sure not to change anything 

That might prevent what will surely  

Come to Appall. 

 

Because clear as day, know it or not, 

From the Sand we formed unpeace from peace, 

And so turns vicious the Precious Plot—  

 

Because dark as night, believe it or not, 

To the Sand we may beg and plead 

But the Lotus is lost to Us Lot—  

 

How fickle it all is, our downfall’s dawn is yawning, 

As are the warnings that, poisoned by our jaded might, 

Only mirror what has by now burned out the light—  

Spit out the antidote before it shrivels you to death. 

 

We are an indecisive crisis diverging from piety 

Solemnly abstaining from sanity and sobriety. 

We will adjust the lens to block our view  

Of a coming crash only the survivors rue—  

Run, run fast, stumble and fall into the vast 

Far from the future, far from the past: 

Anything, everything will do  

To soothe the uneasy untruth  

To satisfy the unquenchable youth 

That’s playfully drowning you. 

Cover picture by Daniélle Amorim