Late in Lockdown: 3

“Someone was there / a moment ago”
It did exist…

Life erodes, slowly –
lacking options to reverse, far less rebuild,
despite the booster’s lies – 
as limestone calcifies around our joints
and we find touch, once sure, now trembles;
excepting avatars

We are besieged by little fears, shivers of anxiety
sprung up like jagged dragons’ teeth,
sown broadly before dawn;
clenched against the Other, tomorrow’s visitor,
we sit bereft of actual conviction, confecting
false intensity to blast across the ether

Pale forlorn Spartans, bearing up our shields,
echoing a richer life which we have come to dread;
“Now we see as through a glass, a scanner, darkly” –
busy on our treadmills, we have become our shadows.
Locked into our own decline ~
Locked out of evidence ~

Late in Lockdown: 2

Shaking out the wrinkles – from our clothes, but not our skin –
needing to reduce, somehow,
the mass of people we don’t know;
If we were to recognise and even greet vague fluttering freedom,
pallid from confinement, weakened by disuse,
what would we see? 

Having swallowed whole the scattered lies of charlatans –
puffed full of empty, hollow, self-congratulation –
we trailed behind;  we’ve worn away our differences
until we must conform, until we are the same:
too choked by passive dust to thrive alone
and too inflamed to flourish through our touch…

Late in Lockdown: 1

Jolted
I cried for you my dear, it seems
and said some words I found
among the rituals, socially-approved,
that frame the sullen emptiness of grief.  Our loss.

Paused:
dodging fleeting bolts of sleep and dreams,
I am afraid to stir the lees of times –
once-experienced, excessively-remembered –
whose less-than-perfect certainty
and smooth-worn grooves of memories
afford me no protection;
against the flooded pits, the silent slate-quarries
you did not wish to see

Crowded
by oppressions, by a muffled world seen from a window,
draped in soured traces of older, gendered, roles:
would you dare admit your part in this?
Is it my time to go?  Since timing is what matters…