Some Good News
Pandemic Poetry
The good news is
you probably won’t die today,
you probably won’t die tomorrow,
the minuscule odds fluctuate like chaos
that lives ever-presently inside
every heartbeat or pause
before beating.
There’s always
a chance for the unexpected,
for the gazillion infinite things
that exist beyond the means of your control
to begin their cleaving tremors
fracturing your illusory
sense of the future.
So why worry?
What will happen will happen.
For now, it is not happening, or maybe
the “it” in question was a loose pebble
kicked down a mountainside
years ago, building to now
in a forgotten avalanche.
Either way,
you would never know,
best to focus on panda bears
losing their virginity in captivity,
the poetry found in sharing
this loneliness like a drug,
to pass the time.
And time, it crawls,
like bubbles from the bottom
of a stovetop pan, watched until it boils,
so slow against the flame of forced solitude,
it’s easy to forget your neighbors
are still alive just next door
in their own thermometers.
The bad news
is always shared first,
it’s human nature to gawk
at the blood and glass on the pavement,
so much it’s easy to miss
the tourniquets applied
from selflessness.
Where a life
has been saved,
there was someone saving it,
someone donating their own time
for the hope in another’s salvage,
a woman perhaps saying
give my oxygen away,
like families
learning how to sew masks,
gifting them to hospitals, nursing homes,
somehow growing closer though 6 feet apart,
or miles apart, meeting online, and singing
what did we do at the end of all things?
We danced.
__________
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