Author: A. D. Lance

(For the Untouched Barb – Still Biting)

For what I have, to what has been,
Our innocent and potent falls.
A fever-like-no-other-dream,
Beauty begrudged within a dead-lit screen. 
Eclipsed, we scrawled imagined walls,
Gilded in Scripture’s diamonds: pull
Apart the distant seams!

Where my Virginia sleeps,
Hills loud and reaching; whitest peach
Unbitten, bathes love’s sweetest valleys.
Perfumed with pine, fed deep.

A die, to cast across the western seas.
A, ‘Hail the Legion’ cry — 
Ocean-closing delusion, I
Conceal the coward within me.

Within a cell,
Within a shell,
Within within.

You, aether-gracing blade
You, night-‘Palachian shade.
You.
You.
Bear me, where you, Virginia, sleep,
Where my low-tides forbade.

Ô mon sommeil, sois tout pour moi. 
Les galbes dont tu me prives, 
Que mes bras les trouvent en toi!

In smiles, you bear as pure — yet wanting — prey,
To share but air, I’d fray to silken shreds.
I’d weave a tapestry of idled days
And pin it to your bed.

I make your sense my belly-ache,
A sober-like-no-other-gloom.
To which I pray I will not wake,
Till I should melt within your womb.

I left your touch to gather dust,
The carnival in me is gone.
But still, my darling Eschaton,
I hold this sick for us!

Note: the stanza in French is an alteration and reimagining of a note by Alphonse Daudet, from his autobiographical work La Doulou (In the Land of Pain). The original reads as follows: “Ô ma douleur, sois tout pour moi. Les pays dont tu me prives, que mes yeux les trouvent dans toi. Sois ma philosophie, sois ma science!”

A.D. Lance is an Edinburgh-based poet. Educated in Theology and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, he blends Romantic lyricism with a modern disquiet, drawing influence from figures like Byron, Baudelaire, and Philip Larkin—who once wrote, “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.” Lance’s poetry echoes that sentiment: tracing the contours of chronic pain, stagnation, and thwarted desire with a voice that is both bruised and formal, restrained and ornate. Irony and longing are his poetry’s meat and wine—nourishing a body of work where beauty is the end of peace. He’s also a musician for the alt-rock band AXIS.