Three Poems in a Time of Plague

In a Time when Clichés Grow Stale and Fall Apart

They are going now, a whole generation of the people so famous

I never heard of them, singers, musicians and other celebrities,

Those long since retired, for sure I thought them already dead,

And some still plugging on and plugging in again:

Unlike the thousands of others who vanish into statistics

These flash on luminescent screens, without lasting fame,

But all the old and fragile victims, unsung and only lamented

Through windowless morgues and tent-cities of the dead.

The homeless still have no homes, the poor, the addicts,

The unemployed, who have no names. Meanwhile

The lowest of the low are suddenly heroes, applauded

By prime ministers and princes, who now depend on them,

The masked brigades of those who spray down streets

And rub away disease in shops, the weary warriors

Of check-out girls and first-responders, nurses

And bedpan emptiers; so that at the end of the crisis,

When our prosaic necessities appear on shelves again,

The great leaders will have passed away to secret lives.

Pandemonium

How comforting when nothing rhymes, when metric feet

go lame, all those worries about alliteration go bong

and bang. and assonance slithers in the mud.

No complaints and no claims of innocence

insinuate themselves into our thoughts.

We need no longer tap out rhythms—we dance

ecstatically in dithyrambs of turbulence like lambs

led to the laughter pits of wild Arcadia. Pan

and Io, yippy-ty-ay-ei through the sky...

Hysteria and hallucination, paralysis

of logic—phlech, they have disappeared. O joy!

Our pandemic is Pandemonium,

so nothing’s left to do now but grab a guitar or lute, my boy,

and strum-strum-strum.

Ghost Ships on a Plaguey Sea

Like bloated hospitals or Narrenschiffen, they sail

The seven seas seeking a port o’ call,

Huge vessels of the elderly and rich, the frail

And homeless, stateless wanderers, with silken shawl

And latex mask, reduced to luxury,

Some in stately-rooms, some in stinking holds,

Fed well so long as the biscuits last, the rye

And whisky flow; peanut snacks with rum,

While staring at the empty sky, that bowl

Of heaven’s offal and Davey Jones’s scum,

Rough tars below to keep the engines pumping.

We sight the Flying Dutchmen on every coast.

Ruby Princesses and Carnivals of the Sea,

The ferries and the wherries, that’s the cost

To turn a gallant galley to a plaguey brigantine.

So heave ho! my maties. Here’s the Jolly

Roger to sneeze you into a perpetual quarantine.