New Middle Ages
The time is ripe for
seeing things anew.
Veils worn over visages
and space to see through,
empty buses
on uncrowded streets
every hour of the day,
fear scrawled like graffiti
across the face
of a Monet.
An elderly neighbor
in need of rescue
from this bad dream
no waking will un-do.
Confined to bed in a rehab,
could he be in fact the lifeline
to the father I never knew?
Perhaps the way to stop needing
is to become needed instead.
Unbeknownst to most,
a few floors away
someone’s doppleganger,
suffers in silence
having contracted the plague.
Skeletal in his tub
receding beneath
his delirium,
squirming like a fish
escaped from its aquarium.
When with holy urgency
a man-child
with Aspergers appears,
ill-equipped for metaphor
but absent of any fears,
who will never love a poem
or know what one is for,
is the last to hold
his friend’s wet hand,
alas, forever more.
Outside my window
the Empire State building
(obelisk of our own Middle Ages)
pulsates like a broken heart
at the center of an Escher,
a lonely hoarder undone
by the vacancy of a room
ill lit by moonlight, or just
the epitome of gloom?
This Reformation has
a midnight sun
that throbs from a face
flushed of wit,
as blinkered as a red
then green neon sign
for a shuttered
Broadway hit.
Meanwhile my cat crawls
into the Trader Joe’s bag
on the kitchen floor
hoping to escape
more unforgiving boards
out to open sea.
I follow her
into her island cave
craving the promise
of novelty.
Its true, we’re both
at the mercy of
the same containment,
both of us
willing jesters
for the other’s
entertainment.
When my eyes spy
the round dining table
making a rolling
break for the woods,
determined to recant
its tableau of words;
a signal for help,
with fresh kindling
for verbs!
It’s legs piled high and
contagious as sparks in air
from a bon fire
made of
incendiary prayer.
Braving my complex hallways,
half-lit, lying
silent as a sunken ship
at the bottom
of a communal dream
I find
my neighbors have fled
further downstream.
The only sign of life
is a dog digging its way
through a door;
man’s best friend
now a derelict wolf
preparing for a war.
In the stairwell
I surprise the man
who collects all the cans,
negotiating the stairs
like an errant king
in fear of being poisoned,
by his way of absconding
from his private castle
of abandoned bric-a-brac.
He meets my grateful eyes
with a misplaced alack.
I assure him he’s done well
to recycle and re-use,
we must change our ways
or it’s ourselves we will abuse.
I'm sure to wake listless
(a not entirely unpleasant
sensation)
as though
from a
version of life
I’d sooner nix;
vulnerable,
destroyed,
like an addict
with no hope
for a fix.
My cell phone dictates
a grail of constant convenience,
(as if an appliance
could save me from this
unplanned obsolescence)
and I ask myself:
Why did it take
a plague
to show me
the error of my ways,
our lives
of artificiality,
the triviality
of our days?
When what we
really longed for
was to remove
the armor
from our knights,
to embrace
the other
without fear
and scale
more inner
heights.
Peter Valentyne
April 19th 2020
One the Time of Corona
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