New Pandemic Decree

Non-essential! It takes time to digest the public offense, bruising the poetic ego essential only to itself, as broad as the world. Howling winds, dark clouds, ghost cities, horizons overbreaming with despair, the low widespreading doubt and the high feverish days filled with progressive red dots on world map, the incalculable pain, spirit out of sight, from my home so far away from and yet so close to work, I run hope's high tide hour, caught on its windblown antenna, its gentle touch on my parched lips, manifesting in form God's grace like raindrops on windows' pane, a poet's disease of tides, insisting on poetry's essential nourishment of the soul, with lion's pride, uplifting earth's exhausted staff not knowing who'll feed the hungry and the birds – poets decree their own confinement to rules of beauty, unhinged freedom, requiring no appeal.