Lot's Wife Edition 1 2021

Lot’s Wife • Edition One
Stars and Other Flashing Lights
Words by Callum Methven
Content warning: paranoia, psychosis,
schizoaffective disorder
Two minds one time and
in between a length of string,
one eye glazed in the sweat
of a day-long fever dream,
a hook along the uphill stream
of everyone I’ll ever be
or was before I died,
our days are numbered still
but numbered are the days
as they were made.
I never sought to see the sky at night
as other than a sea of distant lights
of dark expanse, so vast, so empty
yet so full of songs complete,
resounding hopes of skies to come,
dreams and some of them my own,
full of futures longer than the past
of open cells.
My mind will reach the ocean
by the tea tree stains
of the next September rains,
but forever is a memory to unborn minds,
and a light can shine too bright
and I was born forever predisposed,
my other eye is closed.
Tethered to this string I know
I’ll never breathe again or sleep
and so I’ll do the things we do
and so I’ll sleep with one eye open.
Every sound, slamming door
and every in-between degree
that drops or changes
with the wind, I feel it all
I feel the flush
of flashing lights that never were
and in the sun I feel their shade,
I’ll fight to fly or ply my fingers
on the border
of an ever-sunken cloud
if all the fog would mean
this noise will see an end,
if it meant my mind
would rather sail amongst a soup
than any budding storm.––
My nerves are electricity,
my finger’s touch a spire,
and if only I could ever speak the name
of this one spectre,
say the truth,
my spine a rural street
of Norfolk pines so brittle,
snapping in the wind,
but in the end there are no words
there are no winners
only senses,
and I sense my time is fleeting.
I sense my heart will break at this advance,
and so I close my eyes in the expanse.
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