Quarantine

The sun, the grass, a gentle breeze.

Months of quiet unease. 

Four walls, a computer screen.

You and me and nobody seen.

Coffee, often burnt, made for 9am, 

we bought a milk frother, I am

sure that without it I would have lost

any semblance of reality. Frost

settling (if frost can settle) on my ideas.

Was reality anything different to this? Clock nears

midnight and sleep is as far

from us as any star

has ever been. Seen 

nobody but you, me and my screen. 

And now we step intrepidly out 

and find the world seems to shout

constantly, leaving no second for 

acclimatisation, no more

than a minute and my eyes are burning,

buildings burning, skin burning.

Yearning to be back inside, minutes 

feel like hours and ours are the only minutes

I can account for, yet I cannot count on them.

And then

I feel the sun, grass itching my skin

and I am just sat within; 

I keep thinking that soon I can be home

and make a coffee with frothy milk, home

where I don’t know if I like to be,

do I like to see

the marks on the walls that I should have cleaned?

I should have gleaned

from everything that you told me so explicitly 

that we were in this together; complicity.

Everything has been turned up so high;

and in that extreme silence we have grown; cry

out for something to change; but we are shrinking,

thinking less and yet our range 

of self understanding has reached beyond our walls.

Each time the facade falls a little more,

and each spoken word, uncovering a flaw,

slithers back to the few shadows left by the late light. 

Did I get that right?

Or did right and wrong disappear amidst a constant stream of neighbours barking dogs,

and tapping keys and neighbours barking dogs 

and staccato video calls and neighbours barking dogs

and looking out onto tarmac and closed shop fronts.

I pull at hairs and toe nails, and wait for men on television to pull stunts;

Evil Knievel; tricking my eyes.

We open the windows but flies 

find their way past our ears; 

so tired from listening for silent fears;

we are so alert as to be constantly tired.

‘That man should be fired’

we all shout into the space that used 

to be somewhere you came back to but instead is now the four walls of the accused

and sentenced. But yet so wholly safe and comfortable as to make that statement seem ungrateful.

 

The kettle boils, the beans grind, the milk froths.