Ouroboros (Of Shame, Screens and Want)
“For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice.” (Romans 7:19)
To marinate with you, I soak myself in sin. Kaleidoscopic pink seeps through My Sodom Apple skin.
Digital vomit — all, This city’s lowly claim. Where who am I to have the gall To take an angel’s name?
They buck as blinds do breathe, In screens escorting off This cocoon shape — to flay and reave In ouroboros love.
This mute routine until I melt with you in sin. For guilt from this is guilt I’m still Here, set to fall again.
Panic (A Sonnet)
Stricken, I drain the sky in sharp inhales, The pulse drum rising fast — nerves fly full mast. Alight, as bare soles over rusted nails, As blackened joys relight the wasted past. The gasp between crescendo and applause, In hours, as years, I feel the world sigh. From desp’rate noise to all-pervading pause, That guides the sealing edges of the sky. Above the broken chorus ever sung:“Hold dear, hold tight, the life inside the rot!”I mould a mattress to an iron lung, And to my loins, a dull constrictor knot. Here, find me where the quiet lies won’t sting:If I conquered this room, I would be king!
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.
