Unsexy Sins

Brecht said there would be singing / About the dark times / But I only hear songs of distraction

P.S.A. (PublicATION Service Announcement):

Belatedly, but very excitedly: my poem “Compost” was published in Issue #30 of

Wild Roof Journal

! You can read it and the rest of the issue here.

Death Buddha collage, 7/12/25.

Unsexy Sins

Not wine 
Or weed 
Or women 
(It’s always women) 

Nothing extolled by dudes with long hair 
And acoustic guitars 

But the truly shameful shit 
The sins you can’t write songs about 

At a festival I trade elbows 
With some girls 
And their too-tall boyfriends 

Everybody wants their own space 
And someone else’s  

Were they bitching at each other like this 
At Nova 
Before the guns fired?  

It could all be over in an instant 

Brecht said there would be singing  
About the dark times 
But I only hear songs of distraction 

Gambling, maybe, a fist swung, sure, 

But who would dance to the song of 
Genocide 
In Palestine? 

Who would sing along  
To our ignorance, 
Ambivalence, 
The writhing and wriggling we do 
To shirk the blame?  

Not even the devil could be proud of us 

He was an angel of action, and we— 
We never really did anything wrong 
Because we never really did 
Anything 

The song of our sins is no song 
It's silence 

And who would buy tickets for that?

By Jane McBride

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