Streets are empty
There are warning labels on the sealed doors of shops deemed unimportant
Funny how easily those were identified
They are ones that made us special
That made us free
Weren’t they?
We’re on our own now, so to speak
Sitting in our rented flats
In our shared flats
With tangible uncertainty
For many, not just the few
Seeing our loved ones in the daytime
Unable to hide our faces in the shadows of future plans
Something crumbles
Something elusive something real something persnal
The telly, the trusty thing, takes out minds off it,
I shouldn’t even be writing this,
Not before this whole things is done (which could be years)
But for now
Taking each day for a day, for a morning
A postman throwing his delivery into a window open with outstretched arms, it takes a few throws, what’s in that box, man? Something essential you bet
Beer sales are up
Evenings are mellow
Spring expects us to be out
But I got drunk with my mates twitching faces on skype touching my glass with the frame of the laptop, in the end it felt just as lonely as usual
And whilst I may be a fat cat that has to watch birds thru a window
for a while
There are real & broken men & women
Who have lost things irredeemable at the stroke of a hopeful pen:
Businesses they’ve been building all their lives – gone in two weeks
Their little hand made shops
Their lady cafes with cutesy cakes
Their restaurants with home made recipes passed on for generations
They’re serving dust now
While crowded in hospitals some are dying from something that had never even been on the menu
And we can’t help but wonder why
No chef in particular prepared this
It is taken to the tables by blind waiters
What could be more bitter than a taste of unfairness
What story more cruel than the one where the plot is unaware of its characters and the characters are unaware of the plot
See, I shouldn’t even be writing this
But that’s what everyone talks about
And all those words mean something
Yet none of them matter
When we are all hindsighted
Tragically, ironically so:
Think of Columbus sailing west to India,
The treaty of Versailles, and then Chamberlain in 38
Remember Mao exterminating Chinese sparrows in 1958, 220 million fell to the ground from exhaustion as masses of law abiding citizens waved their flags and blew their horns preventing the terrified birds from landing, next year locusts ate their harvests, 45 million dead from famine:
Chronically hindsighted
But we have to
We have to pretend we’re not
If we want to talk to each other
Have dreams about things and people
Express our experience
Our schooling
Our parenting
Now left without clubbing shopping grilling drinking without eating out where we get what we order like
pocket royalty
Without work that we are now relieved to be relieved of
And scared to be restrained from
Without holidays
We get a moment to ourselves
A little moment without noise:
Are we doing the right things?
Do we know what the right things are?
A moment to ourselves to think about our thoughts, seeing the mess inside
A little moment without fun & slavery
And naked lies
our trust in the future
But we have
We have to be ready
To get lucky
After all, we’ve a good history of that
(written after the fact)
With luck it makes sitting ducks dignified
With luck it makes moths defiant
And the dead
unlucky
Tragically, ironically so,
Just think of the Titanic and the number of lifeboats:
Pomp and luck
But mostly Luck
We are in her hands now more than ever
Sitting in our flats
Sleeping in her shadow
As she moves before the sun
Coming out of nowhere
(be it from a place we call China)
She’s an eclipse our Ptolemys missed
And she can put us all to shame
(including the advertisers)
Children giving in to the will of adults
Adults exposed in the dark
As lighting flashes across the landscape glimpsing primordial phantoms creeping out of the roots like shadows of naked trees but worse
And there’s **** in our pants
And our presidents get to speak of war
But there’s no front line
And borders borders borders are closed
And police police is on the streets
But the enemy isn’t visible
And there’s not enough information
There’s too much information
And we haven’t been taught patience
Proper patience
Or self reflection
So it’s hard to say if we’re learning
Or waiting to fly
It’s hard to say if we’re contracting like a snail
Or sitting on a warm stone like a lizard
Or rising to the surface like a shoal of herring pursued by whales
Yes, we can zoom, but we can’t zoom out
And we’re so used to things getting better
Not just for ourselves but for everyone on TV
But instinctively we are back in our little nests, in our national parks
Looking out the window seeing the world looking the The Scream by Edward Munch
And we notice that we only have ourselves our families our national myth and our government
Which may give us livelihood
And things above and beyond are yet to prove their worth
The cosmopolitan dream failed to enmesh reality
This level’s been abandoned
The deck is being shuffled
We’re playing the 20th century game again
And there will be heroes
But which kind
06.04.2020
