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Writer's pictureMarcus Jervis

Poem, May 2020.


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.



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