You will come to [hope] in time
You will come to [trust] in time

You will come to [fall] in time
You will come to [jump] in time

You will come to [dance] in time
You will come to [march] in time

You will come to [believe] in time
You will come to [doubt] in time

You will come to [forgive] in time
You will come to [forget] in time

You will come to [keep] in time
You will come to [stay] in time

You will come to me

and God is just as God-like,
(what I mean is, just as heavenly-fatherly)
in a pandemic.
Though you do tend to hear Him through a different filter –
and not one of His making.

A filter of a thicker thread.

And, whilst you do need to listen more carefully
(and take more time I find),
He speaks and listens just as intently
and it is unmistakably His voice.

However, I find that I throw more at Him
at times such as this.

Queuing -
When I was growing
it was second nature.
Then we got out the habit -
and started congregating and lingering,
vaguely hovering til the bus arrives
and then converging
with no reference to order
or deference to aging.
Or begrudgingly taking a number
and waiting our turn
til called forward, bringing us
out of our revelry.

It's different now.
Now we get there early,
expecting a wait, a line,
spaced out like it's leprosy
that we're suffering -
Like we're resisting
being associated with the others
who are queuing.

Shuffling.

Waiting.

And once arriving,
being begrudgingly admitted
by the high-viz guy who's masking,
and he's insisting
that our partner
has to wait outside
where it's freezing.

Now queuing
is our new necessity -
our communal normality.

Maybe it'll stick
and we'll be sticklers
for a queue that's orderly.

And maybe - just maybe
we'll find that the queues move
a little
more
quickly.

The completion
The utter exhaustion
Who could imagine that pieces of paper, overlaid and pressed down into a bottomless pit of my stomach could cause so much fatigue.
My house is now sold.

She smiles at speed and leaves my fingers sparkling
with flashes of leather and steel.
She catches my eye in the mirror then falls away
while emerging afresh from around the next bend.  
And somehow she lingers long enough to inject my lap and push me
back deep into each crack in the road, caught in filtered sun
through the crash of leaves, drawing out fear with a surge of adrenaline
pooling in the pit of my stomach and sinking into my sack of stones
that ache and hunger for the straight and the late brake
over the reek of grease, oil and fully leaded fuel,
dyeing my skin a slippery shade of tarmac, diluted by blood
and black rain blinding me with a flimsy sheen shimmering
between me and a dark montage of cries and stillness,
til I pass a pyre that devours young ambition for long life
and casts shadows of a long breath held at the finish,
its threat caught in her smile,
until the next time.

An isolation of poets.
A distancing of poets.

A contagion of poets.
A household of poets.

A necessity of poets.