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The Perfect Vision Plague Diaries #1

Andy7 Comments

Notes on the general state of the neighborhood, the family, and the masses in the time of the virus.

Disclaimer: I really had no idea I was going to go so long, or into so many things. I just wanted to start keeping track of the situation here during our (so far) low grade social quarantine. Things are odd enough out there that having an informal record of it might wind up looking like a good idea. It’s just that jumping into it a couple-few weeks late is requiring some backpedaling. And in any case, as I mention below, things only ramped up to Twilight Zone levels of alarm and theatrics in the last week or so.

The year is 2020, and for not much reason other than that, I’m calling it the Perfect Vision Plague (You know my feelings on naming things).  Also, shortened to PVP, it carries the same acronym as Player vs. Player, which seems so fitting in a time of policing each other’s personal hygiene habits, that it’s like earning a new merit badge in the Cynicism Scouts.

Here’s where we stand now:

King County Coronavirus updates, March 15

Public Health – Seattle & King County is reporting the following confirmed cases and deaths due to COVID-19 through 11:59 p.m. on 3/14/20

  • 420 confirmed cases (up 32 from yesterday)
  • 37 confirmed deaths (up 2 from yesterday)

…………

We’ll just call last weekend, March 14 and 15, “day 1.” It was the first weekend since the news of the outbreak that we really knew where we stood in terms of daily routine. There was no more wondering which schools were going to close and which rogue private schools would hold out – all schools were now officially closed by government decree until at least April 27th. The admonition to stay home from work was strong enough that going to the office on Monday (today) would likely brand you a nonperson among some of your peers. In short, this was the first weekend in which we all officially had The Fear.

Back on Feb 29th, Governor Inslee issued the first proclamation of a particularly worrisome variety  – the kind that sends people, evidently, into fits of involuntary toilet paper hoarding. This was the declaration of a state of emergency for Washington state. It’s probably the best marker for the start of the panic around here, the beginning of the journey into an unlikely blend of camaraderie and McCarthyism. Here’s the synopsis, from the Governor’s announcement of the early gravity of things here in Washington, where things, you know, virus-wise,  are (or at least were, I can’t keep up) worse than anywhere else in the country:

The nation’s first case of COVID-19 was found in a Snohomish County man in January. He had traveled to Wuhan, China and has now recovered. On Feb. 28, the state Department of Health announced two additional cases – a King County woman who had recently traveled to South Korea, and a Snohomish County teenager with no travel history. Both are recovering at home and remain in home isolation.

Doesn’t sound so bad, does it? And overall we were still fairly casual about things. Nothing had been shut down, and even though the toilet paper and hand sanitizer were already becoming unicorns, life was business as usual. The one place to find amplified histrionics and a deluge of virus-related reactionism was, oddly enough, the comment sections of every website. They were neatly stratified into two narrow categories (how strange, I know):

  1. We have a flu season every year that kills tens of thousands! This one isn’t even that lethal. It’s stupid to get worked up over this when we don’t even bat an eye the rest of the time.
  2. SHUT IT ALL DOWN YESTERDAY.

Both categories were experts, backed by science (I type that word with a small ‘s’ and I feel like an atheist lower-casing ‘God.’ That’s the respect your savior gets from me!).

The notification/warning phase was followed by a very rapid sequence of mandated closures and prohibitions, such that by now the grocery stores are one of the few businesses still allowed to operate normally. Yesterday, March 15th, came the most recent order, and the one that says more than anything so far that we’re simply not gonna screw around here anymore:

Inslee statement on statewide shutdown of restaurants, bars and limits on size of gatherings

And that’s where we stand today. The restaurants, bars, and gyms are closed – the gyms! – and most everything else. The aforementioned grocery stores, as well as pharmacies, remain open. Someone in the comments of the West Seattle Blog asked about the pot shops, and I immediately had visions of dirty college kids passing pipes around tapestry-laden rooms, coughing, sweating, and laughing. They’d be scrubbing the mouthpiece with sanitary wipes between hits, and finding out how hard it is to light the bowl when you’re holding the tube between your elbows. Social distancing requires the use of a 6ft. bong.

So how is humanity keeping itself busy? Well, in a move that surprised nobody, certain names for the virus became racist this week, according to the people who used those names last week (and if carving out time for character assasssination during a pandemic isn’t your clue that we might be a little too dependent on racism as a tool of socio-politcal exepdiency, then please, voluntarily and aggressively self-quarantine well after the “all-clear” is issued). I could make a list of things that are closed and canceled, but the links are pretty useful, and unless this crisis ends up deleting the internet, I think the info is safe (he said with a very “hold my beer” kind of feeling in his gut). Here’s the Governor’s coronavirus page, it appears pretty comprehensive and easy to follow, and it’ll have your state-level updates (until the capital is overrun by looters and Inslee is forced into the Olympia underground, eating rats cooked over fires of slow-burning hand sanitizer) (The Republicans will blame his liberal policies for the rats being there at all)(The Democrats will note, loudly, that there is a burn ban in effect)(The actual residents of Olympia will be going back out for sushi by then)

A thing or two about what I think when I take in this whole situation:

About people, about the great and general us:

I have conflicting feelings here, and I resist the urge to grab a very broad brush of cynicism, plunge it into a tub of mistrust, and start stroking away. All the hoarding makes a lot of us scoff – while of course wondering if we should be getting ours while we still can. And a lot of people are using this opportunity to exercise a (let’s face it, poorly suppressed at the best of times) proclivity for telling their neighbors how to live. There’s a feeling, a gestalt, of unease, uncertainty, and a kind of ineffable difference to human experience, as if we’re all walking around inside of our own doppelgangers, suddenly left-handed.

We do love a good tragedy, but only insofar as we can claim proximity to it. Involvement. I can think of a few things in my lifetime that are “where-were-you-when” events. Those turning points – moments of profound social, political, and cultural significance that people try to stamp by talking about what they were doing when it happened. There was the Berlin Wall coming down, The Space Shuttle Challenger exploding after takeoff, and 9/11. There might be more, but a longer list dilutes the significance. Almost none of us had any real proximity to those events, fewer still were actually involved at all, and yet all we want to do is link ourselves to them in any way we can, usually by talking at length about what we were doing when it happened. I’m honestly not sure what we hope to gain from that.  God only knows if it’s a psychological impulse to appeal for even the thinnest sympathy wherever we can get it, or if it’s as simple as a desire to feel more important than we know very deeply that we are. Whatever it is, it has always felt particularly empty to me. Selfish, too, but I repeat myself.

And that’s why the toilet paper is gone.

But we’re good, too. People are helping each other out in any way they can. It’s very hard at a time when physical distance is mandated. This has been instructive in revealing just how much, in spite of all the complaints about the way technology keeps us apart, we depend on close interaction. We pass things hand-to-hand, we hug, shake hands, pat shoulders and backs, pick things up for people when they drop them. We pass food around by hand, and I recall Morocco – eating all those meals with my host family and all my friends, tearing bread for each other, using it to scoop food from the large shared dish in the center of the table. I rarely touched a fork. They’re in the time of the virus, too, and they’ll be having to do things very differently now.

There are a lot of efforts underway to feed the high numbers of children who depend to varying degrees on school lunches. There are some very low-income people who need those meals and will struggle without them, and I hear that all Seattle Public Schools will have meals available for pickup for every SPS student who wants one. Also, the restaurants are closed for dine-in business, but they are turning themselves into full-service takeout vendors. And while this will seem a little too first-world for some people, restaurant availability diminishes the need for stockpiled food at home, while helping to maintain the extremely important sense of normalcy that keeps us all from turning on each other. This is good humanity. It’s why I get the feeling that we’re at a point when real catastrophe will be very hard to come by. We have ways to make things work, and people to do it. If things get really, apocalyptically bad, it won’t be because of a virus or a super-weapon or “the big one.” We are more than capable of helping each other through these things. If it really does go all the way pear-shaped on us, it will be because of us, panicking to the point of hijacking Amazon delivery drivers on the road and, yes, hoarding all the toilet paper.

But I see you cocking your head and making the very concerned face of a cable news celebrity politicizing a crisis and asking “Andy, how are things for you, personally, and that dear family of yours? With all this worry over your health, and also my need for your sage guidance, I cannot sustain a full 20 seconds of hand washing.”

Here’s a weekend recap:

We ate together a lot. It was great. I know people like to hold up the “eating together as a family” ideal as the gold standard in knowing the difference between the Cleavers and the Mansons, but that’s ridiculous. It is definitely very nice to eat together (when nobody is being moody or there’s nothing unsettling or contentious to talk about, and everyone likes what has been cooked, and nobody has anything at all to complain incessantly about) but we simply don’t get to do it very often. Two or three times a week at best. There’s too much work and soccer and piano and swimming and basketball, so we eat far fewer homecooked meals than most people falsely claim to have at their homes. And yet we’re a very good and strong family. Which is why, when we did get to eat together several times over the weekend, it went well.

We also had a baking competition, boys against girls, in which we each tried to make the best Cookie Monster cake. It was a spectacular way to forget all the viral anxiety. It also resulted in two delicious cakes that sanitation requirements forbade us to offer to the neighbors, so we’re enjoying a little dessert several times a day.

Cookie_Monsters
Choose your winner, leave your vote in the comments

I went to the store a couple of times. I’m going to admit as confidently as I know how that I did buy toilet paper. We were down to one package (8 rolls?) at home, so I can credibly say that it was a good time to buy it anyway, but the decision was at least 40% panic. I mean, what if I was the one guy who was too stupid to do it? WHAT WOULD MY FAMILY THINK OF ME. I bought 12 rolls of the weird stuff that was left on the shelf at Target because nobody wanted it. 12 rolls is not a lot. It is not hoarding. I would buy 12 rolls at any normal trip to the store. But it is an odd feeling, purchasing the toilet paper that even hoarding food-stampers won’t touch, when everyone is watching you. “Holy crap, that guy’s desperate.”

Then I went to a different store and they had name brand, super-soft toilet paper on the shelf, so I bought an 8-pack. Now we’re hoarding, kids.

(My wife just came down to tell me that the county in California where her friend lives has made it a misdemeanor to leave your house. We haven’t verified this or looked at the details, and this seems drastic for even those Orwellian pea-brains in that state, so don’t hold me to it. A very quick and shallow google search yields nothing)

We walked in and around Lincoln Park three times over the weekend. Twice with the kids. They hate it and always grumble terrifically when we tell them that it must be done. Still, once we get out and moving they acquiesce to their captivity and have a nice enough time. My son is 9 years old and all it takes is a football or a surprise punch in the gut to make him forget that he’s angry. He’s like a dog that way – sometimes just opening the door to the outside world gets him running around out there with his nose in the air.

Lincoln park
Picture not taken this weekend, in case you were wondering where all the people are.

There were a lot of people at the park, which was nice to see. The weather was sunny but cold and windy. Usually that wind will keep people inside, but it was obvious that what we all really needed, even after just a few days of stress and worry, was to get the hell outside. Air, trees, water, the sounds of the ferries and seagulls, the stiff lashing of the wind on your cheeks – it’s a big reset button. It lightens you, physically, in both color and weight, wiping away a grimy darkness that had settled on you like coaldust while you shuffled around a shuttered house, scrubbing the skin from your hands with 90% alcohol concoctions.

This has gone long. I’ll talk a bit about school and the kids tomorrow, as well as whatever else might come up in this ever developing situation. For the record, my early prediction for the Societal Freeze brought about by the Perfect Vison Plague is that here in the United States it will be over much sooner than we think. We will have overreacted in effective ways, and we will look back on this whole thing as a job well done.

Not the Italians, though. They’re gonna be pissed off for generations.

 

I Assembled This Irrational Post By Random Chance

Andy3 Comments

In lieu of FB, I’m doing these things here. That’ll reduce it’s viewership to about 6 from about 60, but that hardly seems significant.

“Do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.”

“Those who care for something else, more than civilization, are the only people by whom civilization is at all likely to be preserved.”

In the Time of the Virus We’re Not Sick, but…

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One of the more common themes of life as a human, at least as I look back over things, is not knowing what to do, think, feel, or say. All the more true in this time of the incipient plague. Like earthquakes, winning the lottery, and getting published, I’ve got that undeniable sense that it will most definitely “never happen to me.” (He said in an election year.) And as the man in the song says:

“the agony and the irony, they’re killing me.”

Whatever that digression was about…

I’m being a little cleaner, more sanitary (what a word) than before, but that doesn’t amount to much. I’m more worried than before, but again…

I do wish that we would go back to calling it a plague. I like what Merriam Webster gives me online; this introduction to misery and despair:

plague
noun
\ ˈplāg \
Definition of plague
(Entry 1 of 2)
1a : a disastrous evil or affliction : calamity
b : a destructively numerous influx or multiplication of a noxious animal : infestation a plague of locusts
2a : an epidemic disease causing a high rate of mortality : pestilence
b : a virulent contagious febrile disease that is caused by a bacterium (Yersinia pestis) and that occurs in bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic forms
— called also black death
3a : a cause of irritation : nuisance
b : a sudden unwelcome outbreak a plague of burglaries

2b sounds suitably scientific, and that’s what we’re all after these days. That’s why we don’t call it a plague. We call it a what?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

We call it an epidemic. Now that’s science-y! Our saviors can do something about that! Scientists: the people who settle disputes in an indisputable manner, who answer questions with unquestionable answers, and are never to be doubted (except when it comes to food and biological sex; then suddenly they’re a bunch of Keystone Khemists who have no business telling us anything). Test tubes, beakers, swabs, and acronyms! An epidemic doesn’t stand a chance.

But then 2b dons its plague doctor mask, and descends upon us with the “black death.”

In which we think of Artifacts and potential Evocations - Onyx Path Forums

Call it the black death instead of an epidemic and things seem pretty hopeless, don’t they? I mean, just add it to definition 1a up there: “Evil.” “Calamity.” We don’t have labs for evil and calamity, much less black death.  We do have art, though:

Church Records Could Identify an Ancient Roman Plague - The Atlantic
Jules-Élie Delaunay’s “Plague in Rome” (1869)

And there’s literature, from Defoe to Camus, and a little work you may have heard of that’s called, in some circles, The Bible ((science has declared a hyperlink to be unnecessary in the case of The Bible (A little joke that I’m now recognizing has substantial depth to be explored, depending on your sleep and electrolyte levels this soon after DST clock changing)).

All of which is to say that I don’t know what I am saying, or what I want to say, or how to thnk or feel about it all. We have a germaphobe in the house already, so there hasn’t been much of an uptick in the previously sensible sanitation habits (though between me and the kids, our germaphobe hardly stands a chance).  And I find myself reading King County Health reports very selectively, for the information that helps me to not be concerned – all the dying people are old, they all came from the same care center, etc. There’s not much of a reason to give it any thought at all, as long as I do it like that.

I barely remember the swine flu or the bird flu, which are much cooler names, BTW, than Coronavirus, but there’s probably something worth examining in a society’s tendencies when naming it’s disasters – do we shoot for sensationalism? Gravitas? Humo(u)r? (our ancestors would certainly have much to say about the humors in the time of a plague).  I do know that we fancy ourselves a very intellectual culture and society here in the US, and “unseriousness” is frowned very seriously upon – he said, yet again, in an election year.

And I have to say, though I’m sure it’s just coming from the macabre child that will not release its hold on my soul, that I envy a society that called its affliction something so dour, dire, and distraught as “The Black Death.” That’s beautiful. Succinct. I don’t think we’d ever do that. I already note how unwilling people are to joke about this outbreak, and resistance to humor is another mark of a society that overvalues intellectualism amidst a dearth of it. Comedians are brilliant, and geniuses tell huge jokes. But mediocrity (and we are mediocre, on average – definitions and all that) – mediocrity poses and postures, and adopts a serious tone, because it adapts poorly to things that stray too far from the line it clings to. Mediocrity hides best when it moves least, and there’s nothing more stagnant than humorlessness.

I had no idea I was going to go there. But here I am, talking about fear and humorlessness in the time of plague, and in an election year, blah blah. Of course it’s somewhat overserious of me to draw that comparison at all, which fact brings swimming back to me what the man said in the song, and what I already laid out above:

“the agony and the irony, they’re killing me.”

Especially the irony.

 

The Dirty Geese

Andy2 Comments

A few weeks ago, the family and I took a much needed but ill-timed (weather-wise) trip to Camano Island for the weekend. February is no time to head up the Washington coast. That wind. If you live in the PNW, you know that wind. We couldn’t do a lot. But my wife and I did get to take a good walk halfway across a vast bay that went full dry when the tide went out. It was clear from the pieces of driftwood that were still visible when the tide came back in, that we could probably have walked across it wet, too. Aside from that, the weather kept us mostly indoors. It was a nice rental, with a telescope for eagle spotting, and we did alright. Even the kids.

On a local’s advice we made a short drive from there up to La Conner. We were told we might see some snow geese on the drive.  Swans, too, but mostly geese. And we did. One of us pointed out the window to a field next a barn and said “She was right. Geese.” The wife and I shrugged. The kids shrugged. Our sharp black Mercedes shrugged and sped along the Pioneer Highway. And for a few minutes we saw a few more – dozen here, dozen there. “I think that one’s a swan.” But then we turned West onto Fir Island Road.

In the distance we could definitely make out a vague brightening, groundward, inverting the natural order of a Northwest winter, where the light we wait for – we pause for, we die for – is the elusive and short-lived sunbreak. The sky was far too thick to hope for that, but the dark earth of those coastal farms held an entirely unexpected thrill. We drove on and slowed so that my wife could avoid the cars pulled half-off the narrow road while also trying to see what they and their tri-pod mounted cameras were there for. We finally put two German wheels in a bar ditch and looked. Someone must have said “wow,” because it was the only word that could have made any sense.  The road was a new beach, and we had pulled off of it to look at a whole new ocean – this one snow white and downy, the furtive waves of a fallow field covered in snow geese. Thousands upon thousands of them. I believe it’s Carver, maybe Ford (maybe neither) who has a brilliant short story that takes place on a hunt during the height of the snow goose migration in Washington. Richard Ford it is, the story is Communist:

“I put down my gun and on my hands and knees crawled up the earthwork through the wheatgrass and thistle until I could see down to the lake and see the geese. And they were there, like a white bandage laid on the water, wide and long and continuous, a white expanse of snow geese, seventy yards from me, on the bank, but stretching onto the lake, which was large itself – a half mile across, with thick tules in the far side and wild plums farther and the blue mountain behind them”

Our geese were in a muddy field, and with Ford in mind I knew I wanted to ignore the fact that the pure white birds were hiding filthy undersides. This was no time for that. I don’t know if I said anything to my family then about that story – I know I remembered it right away and I hope that I said something. Let them know. Let them in. The world gets too big at a time like that, and a man shouldn’t be alone in it.

We looked for a while. There’s nothing ese to do about it.  I hoped someone would do something else – honk a horn, sneeze, fire a gun – that would make the whole thing lift off. Ford called it a “raft,” but of course his were on the water. I wanted to see if they would all take off at once, or if it might start gradually from one end and curl fantastically off the ground like a giant vegetable peeler scraping off a skin of soap. Or maybe it would be random and messy – disappointing. We didn’t find out.

We moved on to La Conner. Cute, quaint, all that stuff. It has the mildly interesting Rainbow Bridge. We spent a good couple of hours hiding out from the rain in curio shops and galleries. Bought some things we didn’t need, and had a grand finale in a candy store where the proprietors were wonderful with the kids. Walked out of there with way too much chocolate (I’m a sucker for a classic turtle – milk chocolate, caramel, and good, old-fashioned peanuts). The kids ate ice cream in the cold and rain. We went back to the car.

On the return trip the geese were still there, but I think some had left. Or maybe it was just that we’d already had our first time, and it would never look like that to us again. A lot of them were flying, having robbed us of the sight of the take-off that I wanted so badly. One of them, in a display of trite symbolism that could only disappoint, shat a great wad of stewed grasses onto the hood of the Mercedes. This is its own story, I thought, and I wondered if Richard Ford’s characters could drive their Nash Ambassador back out to that lake for a second run, and still pull their triggers:

“I don’t know why I shoot ’em. They’re so beautiful.” He looked at me.
“I don’t know either,” I said.
“Maybe there’s nothing else to do with them.” Glen stared at the goose again and shook his head. “Maybe this is exactly what they’re put on earth for.”
I did not know what to say because I did not know what he could mean by that, though what I felt was embarrassment at the great number of geese there were, and a dulled feeling like a hunger because the shooting had stopped and it was over for me now.

And to think, there was a moment in there when I wondered why we went.

 

 

Unabashed thanks to Gerard at American Digest. For more and better PNW tavelogueing, see his The Olympic Peninsula at the Vernal Equinox

GO AHEAD

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The last thing I ever want to do is the thing that everyone else is doing. For the purpose of this entry, that thing is playing the victim. Claiming specialness. I am not special. I am not a victim. But I am willing to observe, politely and mildly, that there is a bit of an extant sentiment in society that is, shall we say, ever-so-slightly in opposition to men. There’s lots of things we’re not supposed to be, depending on who you ask. But it’s all the same thing in the end, really. The thing we’re not supposed to be, is us.

So what. My entire childhood and adolescence were based on doing exactly what I wasn’t supposed to do. Big deal. Still, here I am: one of these men – at least in terms of biology and mentality – that we don’t seem to want much of. I write occasional poems in support of others like me because after three years in college, I learned more than anything that the most important thing to do is to celebrate and support with the greatest fervor those things that are the most like ourselves. The liberal arts world in college is a world based on the elevation of things of your own kind, and denigration of things outside of your own cultural circle. And also tolerance. Do what you will with that little contradiction.

I am aware of what kind of man I am. I only very occasionally build things, but I have an embarrassingly impressive array of tools. That kind of cliché. I fold laundry more than I hammer steel, I wash dishes more than I turn wrenches. My hands are not hard or large. I am tall but not imposing, and I am (he meekly admits) terrified of confrontations. My God, I think back over all of the fights I have craftily avoided in my life and I am not proud. But it’s still in there, that core thing, that masculinity that is called toxic nowadays. I know our need of it, and bristle at the mockery directed its way.

I am not here to argue against that. It strikes me as hypocritical in some ways. The masculinity I own and revere does not raise its voice to protest. It works and produces and creates and lets that action speak for it. It follows the cardinal rule of the writer in that it does not tell – it shows. I am here not to complain but to be a fan. To write up my support for the hard things that we are, and for the shittily unrefinable parts of our nature that I would not run from a fight to preserve.

Having said that:

GO AHEAD

Be dirty and don’t hide 
your large hands that could 
                    split timber.

They flip thin pages, too,
rattle pans and
feed their fighting heirs.

GO AHEAD

Be mean and lift the heavy thing 
and don’t mind making a little 
                    show of it.

Your beambroad back
can bear it and
won’t tremble in the least

GO AHEAD

Be hard, clumsy and cruel
and let the sneer of the timid 
                    mock itself.

You hardly can part 
from that look that
feeds you its forsaken strength

GO AHEAD

Be bare-knuckled and nude
because we need most what
                    no one wants.

The world knows and 
keeps a place 
for the things we expel.

 

Independence Day

AndyLeave a comment 
Independence Day

Grandpa, Grandma, can we talk to you
	about our mom and dad?
	I don’t know quite what’s going on
	but things are getting bad.

	Dad’s been crying at the news 
	and his voice is higher pitched.
	His jeans get tighter all the time
	and there’s a limpness in his wrist.

	Meanwhile, mom’s been swearing more
	and wearing suits to her new job.
	She hasn’t fixed her hair in months
	and on weekends she’s a slob.

	Dad’s afraid of everything –
	plastic straws and – what’s a Russian bot?
	Last week was Independence Day,
	and he said he “just forgot.” 

	Mom hasn’t cooked a single meal
	since she went marching in D.C.
	And now our yard has all these signs 
	that say “welcome refugees.”

	Dad almost asked if it was right
	but she wouldn’t let him speak
	so he’s been getting craft beer growler fills
	every day for two straight weeks.

	We don’t know what to do right now
	We’re prolly just too young.
	But maybe you’ve got some idea
	of what’s been going on.

Granddaughter you’re a clever girl
	and grandson you’re no fool.
	So we’ll tell you something here and now
	that you’ll never learn in school.

	You’re noticing about your folks
	that something’s kinda wrong.
	It’s not just them – it’s everywhere.
	We’ve been watching all along.

	If it’s hard these days with mom and dad,
	to know just which is which
	You may not have the words for it,
	But your dad’s your mommy’s– 

You’re right, grandpa, school’s no help
	our teachers are all so strange.
	They say two-plus-two and Judy Blume
	both equal climate change.
	
	They took us out of class one day
	to line up on main street
	with signs that said the world would end
	from the President’s next tweet.

	I just want to build some things,
	and when sister tries to sew
	they swear that STEM’s the thing for her
	and I’m privi- toxi- I don’t know!

	Do you think that you could talk to them?
	To our parents and the school?
	Tell them that they’re scaring us
	and that they all seem real confused.

We surely could go talk to them
	but they hate that we’re so old.
	We remind them of the ways they’ve failed
	and the truths they’re scared to know.

	There’s a wisdom in our wrinkled skin
	that they’re trying hard to kill.
	And if kids like you are catching on
	they’ll start trying harder still.

	For now it’s good you’re noticing
	and that your guts say it’s not right.
	Just keep each other close at hand –
	pick your spots, and fight your fights.

Tell Me There’s an Artist

Andy8 Comments

Tell me there’s a painting left not aiming for the earth –
A brush not tilted dirtward, swapping mockery for mirth.
Tell me there’s a sculpture left that isn’t undercarved –
A chisel dulled by shallow cuts and subjects heavenstarved.

Tell me there’s a canvas left that’s backlit by some glory –
A fabric for the telling of ambitious human stories.
Tell me there’s a poem left that isn’t ripped apart –
A song that ends connected to the blessing of the start.

Tell me there’s an artist left not driven by deceit –
A human servant building from the places incomplete.
Tell me there’s an artist left who knows his human error –
And tell me there’s a layman left who’ll view it as a prayer.

 

Rabat

Andy1 Comment

Old and New

 

With a hopeful shoulder against
its thousand-year-old brother,
the new city already shows more rust
and abuse than the ancient medina,

which stands straighter than it should
after a millennium of fire and pirates
and the tearless tyrrany of
Mohammed’s intemperate sun.

Fifty years free of France,
the tall cosmopolis outside
the gates wears the fast
age of concrete and exhaust.

The new city wonders, still half
en Français and slouched
in café chairs that face out over
the bruise-blue taxis towards

the red medina walls, what is the
trick to timelessness, and what
do the buried civilizations
around the Bou Regreg have to say

about the way the Arabs
outlasted them all without
having to do much besides wait
and stay and sometimes fight.

Why is there so little left
of the Romans besides
the coins and shields of
martial ghosts that mingle with

Phoenician busts in museums that
the Berbers came before and
built and left and will see
the end of long before their own.

And those few exhumed slabs
of marble left at Chellah, bought
by the shipload for the price
of their own weight in sugar,

what are they worth now
in dirham or dollars or the
(يا الله)
useless euros mocked in the

clacking laughter that rattles like
a call to prayer from the storks atop
the walls of the hammams, and
whose nests crown the minarets.