e34173503d0fbafd7b42b9958616f6da

What do you say to a housebound suspended agoraphobe?

You hear Greek words in their diagnosis, the turquoise

hesitation of grasping fingers reaching punctured doorway

how even ordering take-out is

courage to face what cannot be faced opaque

the urgency of illness spreading her

mollified mystery beyond

we read Apocalypse books on the Berserker train

sleeping faces pressed against convex glass

the smear of skin oil, traces against trace, glutted

fingerprints even as we know not where we go

tampered before birth with the adultery of a universe.

what do we say to an extrovert cut off at the wing?

Sinning in the best possible way beneath vaporized bar table

licking salt off girls thighs and shooting glasses and powder

with a wink, shouting; How can you contain this shit?

Close them up and give them a key to be used in

a month? A year? Never?  After cataracts?

They burn with attention and fade without

fuel, here, there, is silence and they don’t know

how to be left alone.

What do you say to lovers who live apart?

She stays by her window watching smoldering emptiness

barren streets where once you would walk

up to her and tap on her cleaving shoulder

things were light and free, taken for granted

becoming closed and jarred, boxed in tinted cupboards

within houses shut down like sad faces, eating stale

cake, we try to lift our stinging, souring spirits

sometimes it feels better to binge watch

End Of The World movies and

eat all the bad things in the house, one by one

vacillating between giving a damn and not at all.

The feral cat outside hides her kittens, as if she knows

volatile is the word du jour

the birds sing less as if they can sense

death withers wild against the Oleander

feeling, our collective shutting down, end of

card game, square-jawed gambler has lost his

horse and boots.

Wasps build mud nests, otters chew through

phone lines, apple blossom stands in for

confetti at a wedding of creatures,

clinking wooden cups, the world breathes a collective sigh

animals take over, humans are

yesterday’s big thing, now forgotten

streets sprout trees, lemons fat and sour sweet

concrete, tarmac breaking open

hungry for repair, the long toiled earth

builds trellis’s and green space

from grey whispering ghosts of past

whilst we sleep and dream of

dancing in indigo pointed shoes on patent floors

to dead musicians in violet dresses

held wantonly by the nape of our neck

creatures quietly retake the planet

our savagery emptying like

the very mantle of earth has

shrugged it off, let it splinter, break

wide apart, asking for sexual healing

asking for change, burning the waxen lotus

stigma of our mistakes, time is up. Oh Goddess

have we come upon the end?

What do you say to a child?

Who has yet to know light or dark and asks;

why do we stay indoors, what is the purpose?

We can kneel down and remember, when we

cared, if sparrows fell from their nests and

scooping them up, would run to school nurse

who smelt of magnolias and iodine, our chant

“please make them well, don’t let them die!”

Remember the good magic? Bring it back,

when kids are released they will

not wish to run rough over green fields

tear down trees to make way for

metal and slag, in ten years standing there

smoking inhaling cancer beneath the whistled song

theirs will be a new time

if we learn, we can repair

what do you say to yourself?

When it’s over and it’s just begun?

When we make with every step

a choice

a consequence

a claim on this

delicate land.

For Earth Day 2020.