21 April 2020
Oil costs less than
nothing now, at least on screen. My student says she’s reading Marx
for fun, recommends a video on communism (if I have the time). The death of
capital, foretold. Pundits keep wanting the president to act like a
normal person. When asked about the dangers of opening the country,
he says, “People love me. I won the election.” He says “death”
like it’s a word uttered in foreplay. Cosplay president, dressed in
a long pink tie, shuts the country against its “Invisible Enemy,”
which looks just like an immigrant.
She’s waited years
for her husband to get into the country. They want children. I am her
twitter witness, though not a follower. Does this require an E for
Ethical, as in requirement? Plasma thins, the circulatory system
wobbles. A doctor says you can be breathing well one hour and require
a ventilator the next. My mother’s pulse was strong, even as her
breathing stuttered. She scored high on abstract thinking when she
was forgetting to eat.
I wake up with loss
on my tongue, behind my eyes, in my bones. The old slide shows were
quicker, but this one clicks, then stops, clicks then stops. The
immigrant who ran a corner store in Chiswick gave me candy when I
came back. The neighbor's dog, so cranky it ended up shipped
to the pound after she died. The cop who told my son something
wonderful would happen tomorrow. Loss is of a piece; that’s its
allure.
It’s a collection
of broken things, like pottery whose lines swirl and end at a jagged
edge. It’s feared because it’s past: we lost loss. Can you find
it? Sirens scream down the highway; a cop turned against the signal,
with his blue light on. Later I saw him escort two older people out
of the school grounds. They were talking story through their masks.
Social media becomes a legacy site, where we grieve for friends we
don’t know of friends we hardly know. It’s real grief, but.
Systems fall apart,
like poems into prose, like buddies into monks. Some days it seems
that to record the process is to succumb to it. Not process but
actual collapse. She lost Wisconsin by several thousand votes, as
hundreds of thousands of votes were suppressed. She should have
campaigned more. Effect no longer correlates with cause. Time itself
is rigged.
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