Sanitized Insanity

The world wants me;
A young person itching for life
To stay locked inside
And when I go out of doors
To muzzle up my face
Contracept my sacred breath

Castrated thus my entire life
Cordoned off in classrooms
Told to wait for my time
Wait for my time
Now in this pandemic
Told to wait
Just another month
Just another month
Years will go by

Meanwhile all the same problems still exist
The same frustrations in our midst
And I have the odious sense that something out there
Is getting a perverted pleasure out of all of this

Watching us in a frenzy
Hurrying to suffocate ourselves
While growing fearful of our fellow human
And too anxious to leave our safe, sterile homes
Where we sit in front of electric screens
Pouring colours and amusements into our eyes
As our bodies atrophy
And we become ever weaker
And less alive

Ever more disconnected from our inner voice
Ever further away from the beyond-human world
Where plants and fungi and other animals and
Truth are found

We are forgetting a lot of things
That ecosystems are resilient when in balance
That whole, healthy co-habitations
Can fight off any and all perturbations
And restore themselves to homeostasis

Meanwhile we become ever more trapped
In sterile, soulless cities
Cut off from the source of life and love and truth
Attempting to mitigate this virus
With mechanical means
As if trying to grow a tree from blueprints
Or restore an endangered species with chess tactics

As if the world were that straightforward and simple
As if it were built out of Lego bricks
Not organic, living cords
Intertwined;
A world that breathes
Not a world that is ‘powered on’ or ‘shut down’;
A planet alive

So it is insanity
Our attempts to ‘defeat the virus’
By sanitizing every corner
Of our choking, dying human habitations
And our withering, weakening bodies

We should be doing all we can
To restore biodiversity
Turning our towns
Back into fully-fledged ecosystems
Abound with all types of species
Which will symbiotically strengthen one another
In the happening of living and dying

Building back up our strength as a species
Woven together with all other creatures
A wicker-basket of multiple forms
Instead of this trajectory of wasting

Soon babies will need life-support machines
The moment they emerge from the womb!
How sick our world is
And has been for such a long while!
This virus is not some freak accident
It is not ‘A Strange Time’
We first heaved a cough
Then heaved a cry
At the minute we are tantruming
And will soon to paranoia, fly


I am not sure if this will align or resonate, and if you feel it is out of place, do go ahead and simply delete it. What I have right now, as I write this caveat, is nothing but a feeling and a creative hunch telling me what it wants me to do next…

… here I go…

Today, I received a message
And it was from my mother
The very one
who has always whispered wisdom
She who knows
when others are confused.

The deliverer was an image
A metaphor ready-made

I love this image
Exactly because it is real
I can see my mother holding
a telephone-camera before
this screen and its waves.
It bears repeating,

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Thank you Mr. Walcott
and thank you Mother
for reminding me
I am always arriving

I do my very best
encouraging of feasting
at this table
my food is your food
your smile is my smile
our laughter…

and where are my guests now
if not here with me
alone with my hygiene
…