Poems From Quarantine.
I Urge You to Stay Inside.
All news from today onwards is to be read online,
Because the papers in print cannot be trusted,
Least of all when the paper itself, along with the words, spreads spite and unpleasantness.
But feeling myself grow tired of the monotonous swell of information,
A kind of never-ending bad news,
As though waking up every morning in expectation of something worse,
I have taken to creating my own daily headlines.
Attempting to be introspective as I anticipate months of solitude,
I make each headline more fictitious than the last.
This morning I read that we are increasingly becoming like the Spaniards in 1918,
Who I hear were contained within their lots for two long years
And amused themselves within the dull heat of their cage by tapping at window panes,
Each tapping hand coming together to create a synchronised tremor that was reported to have been heard all across the city of Toledo.
This vibration came to replace all records of time,
When one is trapped inside for too long it is impossible to truly say what hour of the day it is,
Because when one hour fails to differ from the next what use is there in knowing.
The heartbeat of Toledo was at once a countdown towards the next hour of rest which all would conform to, and a comforting sound of life outside the walls of one’s own home.
People became unhinged at the prospect of the knocking ever stopping,
Because in the case of the disconnected city,
Where all lived unaware of how the plague was progressing,
The sound of silence proposed one of two meanings,
Either agony had met its terrible end and all were free to roam once more,
Or too many of Toledo’s citizens had been lost to the plague for the tapping to carry loud enough to be heard by all.
The heartbeat of 1918 was made of the hands of every citizen committing to a tedious isolation,
I fear had not so many stayed inside then the familiar sounds of life would have drowned with that deadly plague.
Female Love and the Ease of Platonic Cohabitation.
We talk each day,
More often than that in fact,
I would say we talk constantly for at least 15 hours it.
Just the three of us,
With a sheet tied loosely from the blind hook on the window pane,
And its other end tucked into the door of the wardrobe
So it drapes over our crooked necks,
And our heads are bowed to the floor in discomfort.
The lamp above the sheet is casting our bodies on the wall,
And that triad, those three animated outlines,
Are what I will later describe as the image of home.
We are the home within the house.
We Are no Longer the People Before the Plague.
We are no longer the people before the plague.
Now that we have woken without intent,
And stretched our limbs,
Just to admire how they move.
Now that we have seen the outside world,
As a privilege and not a given.
We have gulped clean air,
As if it might one day run out.
And acknowledged each breath,
As though the next were our last.
We have confessed ourselves,
Like lovers stood either side of a concrete partition.
And listened undivided to a voice through a phone.
Now that we have acknowledged the part we play in the whole,
We are not isolated in anything but distance.
We are no longer the people before the plague.