Prologue from the Pandemic 1. It Began To Go Wrong

It began to go wrong when doubts were nursed into distrust

in all streams of information flow, media, fake facts,

spin out of control, whirling

the corruption of politics business of greed

decimating public good with ammoral sledges.

It began with local news destroyed by conglomerate agendas

of laissez-faire powers to distort truth, bury facts,

murder journalists, all of it financed by

a coin in the money laundry,

when the losers of the second world war

won the peace in 1984’s electioneering coup:

anyone with a working sense of distrust

doubts every word that spreads from the mouths of most powers.

In that spirit, the appearance of a new virus on a planet battered

by pillaging and indifference to the largest and smallest forms of life, ensured the news of a rapidly spreading disease was met with theories

of conspiracies unfolded by the world’s various, competing,

military-industrial complexes and their Officed servants and financiers: by a planetary coup of gangster capitalists,

by a China run by billionaires pretending to be communists; 

by an America run by billionaires pretending to believe in democracy through their Grifter King

who’s con agenda at odds with the personal health

of everyone on the planet, skews news to lie and facts

with no trace of common human or planetary good defenders in their circle

of bots and shills and gospel spoilers alert to opportunities to distort

truth across a wide array of bought and paid for sources,

which is how the emerging pandemic

made us all victims of our own false doubts fed to us

from fake news broadcast from all sides, street level

competing opportunisms, from those with criminal intent,

insisting on the return to work of the already abused and devalued, essential workers, who have forever

proved that they, not capital, are the means of production

the front line between humane humanity and capitalists.

The succubi rich continue to feed off the host

from the safety of their places in the shadows

while the virus unleashes unexpected depths of community

where ever it spreads, turning provincial privateers into agents of common good

 washing clean the contempt of old ways on TV, or not, we'll see.

Emergency Room Visit

A new layer of pandemic precaution greets me inside the sliding doors of the Fergus hospital. 

I have come because my right hand is inflamed with infection, leaving it hypersensitive from old, 

caustic, masonry burns compromised by cellular memories reacting to dust allergies disturbed during our slow, 

week by week move by car from our Elora apartment to our Owen Sound flat, my hands compromised

 by my initial over-zealous application of disinfectant in both homes

have left me now displaying the red, raw skin of my right hand to Health Alliance nurses 

probing my reasons for entering the hospital.

After freshly sanitizing as per their instructions, they wince in empathy as my stinging wounds 

are offered to them; the lava-like reds of flesh and dissolving skin-rock islands of molten mess 

vouchsafe my presence, but I also promise them that I have not traveled abroad or 

knowingly embraced anyone recently returned from elsewhere;

I admit my nose is runny but only when going out into the cold 

as I just did from my car to them and I have no fever, or dry cough,

what I have are burning hands now yellow with pus from the workings 

of a previously applied off-the-shelf anti-bacterial cream responding too slowly

 to stop the catastrophic spread to every nerve in my body so the guardian nurses 

allow me down the hall to Emergency, adorned in my new, accordion-fold mask, 

which I wear like an entry prize.

I expect to find the room full, but it’s almost empty, too many patients 

staying away from hospital hallways as vectors of death, but

I know from the radio that emergency rooms are among the safest places to be, 

nonetheless, none of the usual suspects are here: no cuts, bruises, breaks, gashes, 

slashed bits or internal ruptures have come; they must exist still in equal numbers, 

since they’re always here, but I take one of the many empty seats, as always by a window, 

half of all the seats in the room taped-off as not-to-be-sat-in; a social distancing measure

 against happenstance and misadventure, while an older man, stickered-defined as a Visitor, 

 gingerly pumps his own wrapped hand, gazing out the window into internal, displacing realities.

I am quickly registered and not long after taken by a nurse to inner sanctums of triage care, 

where I find myself once more trying to articulate who I am from the self-isolated depths 

of my own befuddled solitude, until I am diagnosed, outfitted with a prescription and 

sent on my way all the while aware that my last visit here was last summer after

I found blood in my urine while returning home from 

my mother’s last cancer treatment in Barrie.

The all-clears for both my mum and me were given separately last year, 

 but two and a half months ago, three weeks after her late-January birthday, 

her 88^th, she died of a recurrence that swept like a crawl understood only afterwards as quick 

back when Covid was still no more than news of Canadians trapped on a cruise ship 

just as the World Health Organization was declaring a pandemic.

In the aftermath of her death, international economies collapsed onto essential workers 

routinely under-valued though not in her eyes or mine; events now flow in dazed weeks                                           

while hopes for salvaging the living Earth through humane intercessions keep

hoving into and out of sight, nation after nation’s bipolar best and worst gathering momentum 

and she not here to cheer or decry any of it with me

in the days before my first Mother’s Day without her.

I leave the Fergus hospital distracted from the crawl of my subcutaneous itch by 

thoughts of mum gone, not there to phone while the next patient registering is an older woman, 

calling out questions to her daughter as my sister once answered our mother, 

knowing I will never know their outcome.

Human frailty shares itself: alienates complacency; existential kindness 

is offered and taken in glances, strangers greet in passing, often aware 

that our common causes are now redefining the possible, to the point 

that we can even imagine how the natural world might one day recover from us.