About

Ozymandeus is a community journal publishing new, original writing from around the world. Without a political or literary manifesto, the journal exists as a forum for the literary expression of its contributors – you.

Original submissions of poetry, prose, dialogue, non-fiction and any other forms of the written word are gladly received for publication.

Ozymandeus is founded on the conviction that the ordering of the modern world dampens creativity and smothers expression, in all its forms. Too many stories are untold. Scrawled on the shadowed pages of notebooks or penned in our minds they yellow and fade away. Within them and between them lie disparate visions of the worlds we live in and experience, real or imagined. Ozymandeus is their salon, and all are welcome.

The Earth is laid low by an invisible enemy: a genetic invader provoking peoples’ immune systems into a lethal storm. Caligulas sit on its thrones, and swathes of their people bid Incitatus assume tribunician power, citing their gods. Compelled to stay home and apart we look on as the world we’ve known recedes before us, day by recurring day, across lone and level sands stretching far away.

Of Ozymandias’ kingdom - long since condemned by hubris and consumed by the desert - only his words remain.

And so too may yours, preserved on these pages.

~ Ø ~

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818