"Worms and Gods" by Sebastian Vice

We

The human-ape

A god-like misfortune

A worm-like manifestation

Stricken with consciousness

Dangling from decaying bags of skin

Entangled in a paradox

Of the human condition

Our intellects soar to the heavens

We dream of things yet come to pass

And sometimes actualize them

We conceptualize infinite hierarchies of infinity

We achieve a kind of divine sublimity

And in our tenacity and audacity

We are gods

But the sun beats down on our spoiling flesh

We are beings tethered to Earth

We Breathe in and out

Each moment, consciously or subconsciously

We sublimate that

We eat

We piss

We shit

We fuck

We age

We fall ill

And in the end

When sublimation fails

And the ego crashes against reality’s shores

We Return to the dirt from which we sprung

In our impermanence and fragility

We are worms

We

The human-ape

A god-like misfortune

A worm-like manifestation

Caught in the unfortunate position

Of unreconcilable contradiction

Of being a divine putrefaction

Death takes us all

And regardless of form

Maybe it’s amazing that

Though our existence but a cosmic blip

Transitory and fragile

We even got the chance

To witness the strangeness of it all

Sebastian Vice is the Founder of Outcast Press devoted to transgressive

fiction and dirty realism. He has short fiction and poetry has been

published in Punk Noir Magazine, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Outcast

Press, Bristol Noir, and Misery

Tourism, and Roi Fainéant Press. He contributed a chapter to Red Sun

Magazine's book The Hell Bound Kids (May 1st, 2022) and writes a

regular column called "Notes of A Degenerate Dreamer" over at A Thin

Slice of Anxiety. His flash piece "One Last Good Day"

was nominated for Best of The Net 2021. His debut poetry book Homo

Mortalis: Meditations on Memento Mori was released April 4th, 2022

through Anxiety Press.