Going through some files, I came across a poem written a mere three months into the Covid pandemic - that seems an awfully long time ago now. I like the episodic and incomplete nature of it. I hope you enjoy it.
May, 2020.
01.05.2020
It turns out that plagues and pandemics
Aren’t like Mad Max after all.
No steampunk cars or alien bars
Not even a pint in Weatherspoons.
Just socially-distanced lines and meetings of minds
For organised claps and laps of the garden
By crippled soldiers who cannot forget
That the Spitfire overhead is no majestic spectacle
But a bringer of death and mayhem.
At the going down of the sun
We will remember them until we forget them
And blow up some other poor sod
Like so much collateral damage.
In hastily built mortuaries
The bodies pile up like they did in Dresden
And London and Tehran.
Peace through superior firepower and the will of
A merciful God.
The cynics cry eugenics
And CEO’s spy opportunities by
Commodifying terror in new revenue because
We all worship money now!
We sit around in track pants, staring at screens
And remembering dreams –
There was a dream once
Wasn’t there?
No, it isn’t like Mad Max after all.
02.05.2020
Once, a while back, I remember being in a spinning room:
Hospital-white, clinic-clean, like a dream –
But that’s as throwaway as the thoughts of the day –
Which I’d love to say were profound but were, in reality,
Just about stringing enough words together
To not be thought of as crazy and all at sea
Somewhere deep and blue and scary with sharks and teeth
Beneath the surface.
If dreams were ever clear, it was probably the wrong dream
All along
All along.
The watchtower?
I laughed out loud at that.
And they sent me away with an injection.
03.05.2020
It’s good, I guess, that this time is here to create.
To play with some words and doodles of the mind.
When we delve, when we search, when we reach
For things we usually neglect and eliminate.
Not wilfully, intentionally, deliberately,
Just from simple circumstance and
The need to be faster, better and more.
The battlefield is global and everyone has a gun
But you don’t know who the enemy is –
Or what? Is it a Superhuman or Superstructure?
I don’t know.
But he, she or it may as well be invisible as
We are shadow-boxing blindfold.
Feeling cold.
Still on hold.
Your call is important to us
(But not important enough to answer).
Nobody’s home.