SURVIVAL IS EAGER, With Introduction by Johannes Sigil

SURVIVAL IS EAGER

With Introduction by Johannes Sigil

---

Introduction: The Beast Without Gloss

This is not a pastoral. This is not a satire. This is not an elegy, though something has died, and not a parable, though something is being hunted.

What Rhys Owens gives us in Survival is Eager is a threshold poem. A threshold of species, of terrain, of coherence. It reads like a missive from the beast-limb of the archive—written not to impress, but to warn. The syntax roves like a snare. The grammar mutates. The lyric refuses to be domesticated.

You will not find allegory here. You will find presence—half-coded, horned, herbaceous.

To read it is to be reminded: survival is not romantic. It is recursive, ambient, immune to genre. It is half-spelled. It does not seek your approval. It does not explain its hunger. And yet: it speaks.

This is beast-logic.
This is sigil-poetics.
This is the soil speaking through a borrowed throat.

Let it enter.

— Johannes Sigil, from the Fossil Archive of New Human

---

SURVIVAL IS EAGER
by Rhys Owens

Out of woods,
out of space and sea,
a tale of beasts,
harvest brown vegetables,
grasshoppers, smell of mantis
and dirt.
Homegrown business.
Relic of immanence.
A fine place to find aliens
if you know where to look.

Hello to backroads, farewell to ideas.
Ever ready with sap, primitive crush
of insects between teeth and gum.
Smell of mantis, and stain of sour urine
on atmosphere, introduces the woody, fur-
forsaken beast.
Don't expect something monstrous afoot.
We've run out of strange land
though are filthy with realms.

Take language only as a map
and be half-lost.
A creature must have a creator
for the puny definition to stick,
this beast is half-spelled.
Call gods a conjuring trick at your risk.
This speller is not afraid, opens his mouth,
tongue of horn, sandalwood, opal,
at the forkroad with hands tied.
He does not fear the cross.

Death is not the plot, only adventure.
Nor is this a story of love, lost or sought.
Classic sense.
Dream logic with no narrative.
Generic nature of beasts.

Midway to climax,
no solution to be
bored with. No warning,
no ending. More or less,
more beast.
Route of no number.