Sequestration
I never told anyone how my ears reverberate in a silent room.
The whirring drone ever present, a conquistador of my private spaces.
This is my cohabitation with an industrial generator.
But I’ve graduated from the torment.
My attitude detours trance-like into pockets of thought.
It is either that or delirium.
I never told anyone,
despite incessant resounding Cochlea,
despite a wanting of tactile tenderness,
despite the moments of exhausted weariness,
I better decrypt my indwelling meanings alone.
I never told anyone how solitude is my comfortable companion.
Seclusion proffers reverie’s cloak.
Privacy presents composure’s cerebration.
But I’m no Anthony of Egypt or Henry David Thoreau.
Maybe it’s more like autism.
I just seek seclusion’s familiar order.
Of course this mandated separation perturbs some.
I too endure this screen time remoteness,
this appearance of presence, this boundary to
proximity. I never told anyone.
More cataclysmic, the untold millions.
The gnawing stomachs of jobless workers.
Cretins and charlatans forecast economic happy talk.
But more menacing yet, the insidious microbe.
the roving ghostly affliction.
No, I never told anyone.
Wave upon wave of the necessitous sea
washes up on forbidding shores.
This is not a time for poems of
scented candles and sweetened tea.
I never told anyone
how in dead reckoning I reckon with death.
Paroxysms assault my sullen sleep.
Dirge beckoning summons my figment depths,
where I contrive dying, a rehearsal assuaging angst.
I never told anyone.
There is a hubris among pretentious egomaniacs.
They are snarling libertarians in romantic defiance.
Their lethal infections kill anyone.
Yet, words of warning evaporate on the breeze,
Their narcissistic America forgot goodwill.
But how do I thank Asclepius?
All his careful nervy heroes on the frontlines,
all his alleviating exemplars of the pestilence,
a masked army of social sanity asking nothing,
while risking their élan vital daily.
Yes, they too measure our specie’s advancement.
I never told anyone.
I listen again to the requiem.
Death robs so thoughtlessly.
Somber inflections intone as coffins of mothers,
sons and sisters file past.
They were once neonates leaping and laughing.
They were once wise grandmothers full of humanity.
They were once fathers working two jobs to survive.
I never told anyone.
I never told anyone
how effusive morning sunlight floods my windows.
Now we have passed into the season of sowing.
Our confinement lets animals claim our cities.
Our shutdown cleans air better than regulation.
I live another allergic seedtime, hankering to wring out wet eyes.
Now, my years are shorter while each day gets longer.
I lose myself in the in the pages of richer more studious minds.
My head severed between sequestered meanderings
and resonating inescapable ears,
my whirring drone a conquistador of my private spaces.
This is my cohabitation with an industrial generator.
I know now, my modest life is but a diversion.
My acuity is held hostage as COVID-19 smokes us out.
No, I never told anyone.
Copyright ©
Thomas Wells
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