Birds With Vertigo is out now!

“Faith is in the ache of becoming more than despair. Those who do not hold their breath are forever doomed to drown.”

This maxim I made preposes the content of Birds With Vertigo. Every greasy paunch needs its slap of ritual basting, and it serves as more than a catastrophic warning of the doom-filled grotesquery ahead. It sets the stage for an exploration of despair, survival, and faith in the midst of a fractured world.

Near the third month of my sectioning with psychosis in 2021, I had my first unsupervised walk with my mum and stepdad. It was barely a few yards

 before I tried absconding. From tackle to cuddle from the guards and nurses, I was bawling streaks with my heart throbbing in my gullet.

It was then that I had my first certain experience of what I consider despair. This was no cerebral notion or fleeting sadness—it was a primal culmination of every raised hackle and porous submission to thoughts that were not my own.

The feeling was not too dissimilar, I imagine, to spelunking Nutty Putty’s tightest nooks with a broken torch, a scoliotic spine, and a faraway echo of the team leader's words: "No need to do a head count! I've got a photographic memory!"

Despair, in its rawest form, is the fear before resignation on the way to the chopping block.

In contemporary society, we are often at odds with our emotions. We call depression boredom or boredom depression. We defer to nebulous causes of import, showing reverence to abstractions while treating manifest suffering with gifted reticence. This dissonance grows in the context of existential thought.

It seems to me that we find ourselves unable to act in accordance with our deepest values, judgments, and value judgments—constrained by the illusory parameters of an organizational culture of distorted retrospection, no-contact contact sports, and the browbeating of erroneous appraisement. Introspection itself, once a sacred act, has become suspect—deemed indulgent or unproductive.

Here, Jesus’ parable in Luke resonates: “For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”

Yet, even humility can feel compromised. When we shut the door to reflect, we are no longer alone; we are surrounded by the millions signalling fear and sowing doubt. Religiosity, once a pathway to personal connection with the divine, is now tethered with bound hands to temporal actionism—stripped down and recast as a clinical symptom.

The privilege of convenience dampens the spirit. When presented with an endless catalogue of competing frameworks and ideas, many resign themselves to populist ideologies or establishment dogma.

Curiosity, though it faces its detractors, is vital. Yet mustering it has become a hulkish and heavy-headed task. What will happen when the lukewarm comfort food is taken? Too many men will accept starvation in a world full of abundant choice.

This brings me back to despair—the anthesis to faith. How can one reconcile with a truth of a transient nature? Is truth greater than its name? Is it truth when it is not a day later?

I was born and raised Catholic, embraced the atheist scene with snark and certainty, drifted into psychonaut coteries of self-medication, and now find myself tepidly scanning Gnostic and occult teachings. The inference that this journey represents progress is mainly absent. These stages could be reached in any order without yielding any greater enlightenment.

The sequence matters less than the last time you embraced willingness to change. What I do have faith in, however, is faith’s utility. Faith adapts to experiences, reasons with a heavy heart, and fosters trust without sacrificing discernment.

When suffering is upon us, the only thing that matters is not surrendering to its pressure and depth.

I say this now as a therapeuticized "post-addict" that once wallowed in the midden dross of benzos and opiates—quantities that afforded me less than an hour of conscious reality a day for many years. I am now 30 and striving to make up for that lost time spent giving heed to persecutory phantomic utterances and the wanton gorging of pills and grog.

In Birds With Vertigo, despair is not merely a theme—it is the landscape from which all growth must emerge. The grotesque, the absurd, and the fractured madness within the collection, from carnivalesque vignettes to verse scorning the demiurge, are not just reflections of suffering but invitations to confront and embrace it.

Faith is the stomach to wade and stir. There is plenty ugly dredged up to contend.

But it is my hope that Birds With Vertigo resonates with those who, like me, have felt despair’s grip and sought faith in its wake. Those who will laugh as the world burns, knowing there will still be truth to find in the ashes.

You can find Birds With Vertigo here.

I also want to shout out Cumsleg Borenail for adapting seven of the pieces from this book into an aural clusterbender of unsettling, sharp spoken word accompanied by hellish dark ambient soundscapes. Please visit his Bandcamp page and perhaps donate to the 'name your price' collaboration!