Maitlis

12 weeks ago: "am I overreacting?"
Now: "is it already too late?"
3 months to go from hesitation & doubt
to "we can't afford to wait!"
The barbarians are already among us,
they are no longer just "at the gate!"
We've watched a slow-motion car crash
with our foot upon the brake.
Who knew that 60 seconds of truth
was all that it would take?
60 seconds is now more truth
than the government can tolerate.
Who would have believed 12 weeks ago
that we'd be in this state,
where "common sense" can become
"civic duty" when they dictate.
We slept through all the alarms
over the last five decades.
This is not an opening move
now we're in the endgame.
Ever decreasing spirals countdown
to every decision we must make:
the months, weeks, days, hours,
minutes, seconds of this outbreak.

Bug bites

I'm hyper-vigilant
and socially distant
and see people as a threat,
so I meet this bug
with a shoulder shrug
because we've already met.
This quarantine
is where I've been
all the days of my life.
You're so surprised
because your life disguised
the way that these bugs bite.

Save yourself

I thought I needed someone else

to tell me what I couldn't tell myself. 

I thought I needed someone else to say

"Stop apologising. Breathe. You see? 

The world didn't have to hold its breath

so you could catch yours. You don't need

to say sorry for existing. Just breathe". 

I thought I needed someone else to say

I'm not the monster, shameful, disgusting,

until I realised I wouldn't believe them 

unless I already knew it to be true.

I don't need anyone to save me after all.

Quicksand

The spirit cannot escape the flesh.
The high ideal, the absence of ego,
the soaring spirit lost in panorama,
finding its cloister in cloud cathedrals
above quotidian earthbound toil,
suddenly discovering its liturgy
is incomprehensible, its tongue tied
to boulders at the bottom of the sea,
dragging it under the silt-like flesh
that engulfs its every dream of a reality
that exceeds mere urge and appetite,
cries out one last time, it's open mouth
the very opportunity the sand requires
to spill in, filling lungs that once breathed stars.

Kingdom come

We are kings in patchwork robes
sitting upon irrelevant thrones
unaware our palaces have become asylums.
The hallucination of state has disintegrated
into ten thousand competing lunacies.
The city fell and was abandoned long ago.
No-one notices. Only wolves and their prey
wander back and forth through the breach.

Courtiers squabble. A cascade of fallacy
swept through our solemn deliberations
like a virulent pathogen infecting our logic.
We second guessed ulterior motives,
made those to whom we attributed them
fair game, and argued with the ghosts
of our own fears and fevers and bad faith.

Frustrated by apologising for our own existence,
we argued by accusation, scavenging for grievances
while our enemies whispered wild suggestions,
until at last we opened our minds by lobotomy
and all courtesy became madness,
and now we sit and rule a realm of memory,
and dream of restoration from rags and dust.

The elephant man

I know I'm not a monster
but I've always felt this way.
I hoped that you might be
the one able to say
I'm not, but you don't know me,
you haven't got a clue.
I cannot save myself
and, it turns out, nor can you,
so I'll keep my lonely vigil:
what else can monsters do?

I know I'm not a monster
no matter what they say,
but if they say it often enough
I can't help but feel that way.
My stock response to every laugh
is that people laugh at me,
a lesson learned long ago
from which I can't break free.
Humiliation sticks like tar,
a stain that's here to stay.
I know I'm not a monster
but I'll always feel this way.

Once upon a time

We think we share
a common present
but all we are
is ripples. The stone
we toss into the pool
remains forever secret.
All we know of others
is delayed and refracted,
amplified or attenuated
by unknowable interactions
before it reaches us
upon a tide that swells
from the beginning of time
to doomsday, when it turns out
there never was a pebble:
that was just a story we told,
to pretend we understood,
an illusion of individuality,
when in the final analysis
a single moment of time
only makes sense
for everything at once
or nothing at all.

Remember, don't rejoice

Remember, don't rejoice:
if you must raise your voice
do not echo the cheer
with which the news
of victory was met,
reflect now on its cost,
which we pay yet,
and what was lost,
so that you have that choice.
Remember, don't rejoice.

The disaster circus

Everything that can be said
has already been said. All variations
on the theme have been explored,
and we now just endlessly recapitulate
that we are simply begging for our lives.

The last ringmaster hangs
from the top pole
with the trapeze for a noose.
The big top is a tumbril,
and with blood for greasepaint,
clowns control the disaster circus,
juggling excuses in the soiled sawdust,
giving their tedious, exhausting display
of malignant surrealism
to a captive audience,
mistaking our cries for applause
as we beg for our lives,
and performing more atrocities
in response,

                            so do not beg.
Fight back. The flip side of futility
is perseverance despite it all,
meeting death's grimace with disdain
which no loss can defeat. Fight back,
and one day you will recognise victory
from her fragility, and cherish her
for as long as you
are left in peace to do so.