_Author: A. D. Lanc_e
_
(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: pullApart the distant seams!Where my Virginia sleeps, Hills loud and reaching; whitest peachUnbitten, 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, IConceal the coward within me. Within a cell, Within a shell, Within within. You, aether-gracing bladeYou, 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 daysAnd 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.
