This is a collection of bad poems, short stories, rushed parables, and hastily-written diatribes written over the last 4 years. Shut in my home due to the government’s tyrannical response to COVID, I did a lot of reading, thinking, and reflection.

During this time, I came to admit to myself a lot of dismal truths about the “true” state of humanity, especially when it is pushed to the limits by fear and doubt. In such cases, Man becomes savage and focuses on the differences in his fellow men; he leans into his raw savageness to bifurcate and destroy. He is primal. He is reckless. Is this his Humanity coming to the surface, or, rather, is it him abandoning his Humanity? I still do not really know…I also sought to explore in myself, and the world around me, what might be called ‘the meaning of life’; and I pondered such profound questions like ‘what is Truth?’

These are questions with which far smarter and more sapient philosophers than I have grappled. Forcing these naked thoughts aloud, often brutally and with reckless abandon, was a catharsis—especially as I watched the world burn and family members, friends, and neighbors turn against each other. I saw just how quickly an apartheid state could form virtually overnight, driven by the mad whims of Elites who use disasters such as war and disease to their own cruel benefit. I saw language re-shaped and defaced before our very eyes. I watched, as the adage goes, “democracy dies to the sound of thunderous applause.”

And so I wrote, and poured my muted and broken heart. For as Robin Williams stated in Dead Poets Society: “I'll tell you a secret: we don't read and write poetry because it's pretty. We read and write poetry because we belong to the human race; and the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, Law, Commerce, Engineering... they are noble and necessary races to dignify human life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love are things that keep us alive.”