The Death Historian

They found them slumped in their cars en route to the ER.

They found them in apartments od'd and self-harmed,

in the ICU with chests cracked open by machines,

tubes ferried down throats on fire.

Some lie in comas. Some lose a limb.

And the nurse clasps their hands so

they don't die alone.

There are sirens keening. The morgue is overflowing.

There are bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks,

that mirror facing us and the threat of silence,

too much to bear on our own.

We cower-in-place, too frightened to breathe

the less-polluted air.

And the bus driver gets spit upon.

And the store clerk risks her life,

so we can hoard paper

to wipe our behinds with.

There is a new protocol for touch.

There is a circle of suffocating light in the jail cell.

The corona atop an ICE skull glows in its cage.

And that dead ER doctor had seen enough so the hospital

corridors are hushed and there is a harp's Amazing Grace.

And this was meant for the old (like you, Grandma),

and the black and the brown, and they are beating Southeast Asians

in the street, calling them by Chinese names

and I buy Mr. Chen's fried rice weekly to atone

and resist the call to inhumanity.

Truth tellers lose their jobs. Only the lies of MBAs suffice.

The world is going blind to the hysteria of the grieving poor,

rent now months overdue and no grace, no grace for you.

And Navajo Nation is ravaged again. And Canada won't open

its border. And Mexico is shut down too. This is the shithole country.

You can't get a passport now to save your life.

And the bomber plane crashes into a neighbor's house.

Georgia cooks the books and sends the nonessential

essentials into orange virus death.

"Throw Grandma from the train" and into the flames

of Wall Street's oven. Work Will Set You Free

coming from the mouths of Bergen-Belsen

and soul-snatchers everywhere.

They clamor for opening not the heart, but the death box.

Open and re-open they bray, hollering for more death

as long as it is not their own.

And we rush into the hair salon. Crowd into the barbershop

and get infected 100 times more. And there's no parade for the dead

even though body bags lie in state at the White House gate.

And the number is always an undercount in this necropolis.

But the helpers rose to cancel the metallic haze hovering over our cities,

plasticized water, sleeping in the elements, charity drives for the cost

of wellness, the millennial nightmare of debt and never-ending catastrophe.