What do you have to lose?
Pandemic Poetry
It’s so easy to focus on the negative,
when you know every breath
contains the possibility of your death:
hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin
without the benefit of a clinical trial,
like dreamcatchers made of coffee straws
and the bones of crows, woven and promised
to provide the restful quiet of morphine skin
without the itch of mosquito tongues.
I live now in the same world
where politicians move their stock around
to accommodate room for the bodies
that will be buried in their state parks
among the flowering trees and the fountains,
the ducks and the swans craning their necks
to peer through the black iron fence rails,
yes, yes, a goose did just waddle
across your freshly dug grave, but that shiver
you felt wasn’t the whisper of predestination,
it was the cold nerved settling of resolve,
that despite the horrors of blood lung and intubation,
despite world leaders willing to give children
the keys to airplanes set to fly overseas,
despite every minute containing a flood
of reasons to step out the nearest window
like a feather tied to a barbell,
this disaster, like every hell born or remembered
will exist with the equivalence
of a single finger snap, a single clapping of hands
signifying the waking from another restless dream
to find everything placed on the nightstand
exactly as you remembered, and the dandelions
of the yard still bowing their heads in prayer
to a merciless god of blades and gasoline,
a world where peace is often a matter of perspective,
and this illusion might as well greet itself with a smile.
__________
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