Please, can you snap out of it, please?
The pandemic’s loosening up its death grip a bit now.
Don’t think it’ll ever be gone, but it’s being a more lenient judge, currently.
You’re triple-vaccinated, and still educatedly cautious, but
come on, it’s time, it’s a-year-and-a-half’s time,
so why not go see more friends, still masked of course,
enjoy company again, eat out, drink out, joke and laugh face-to-face out.
Ease up, hang loose, go with the flow, get in gear and go.
Just don’t know.
Something’s not right; maybe it never was.
Never much for gatherings of people beyond a few,
never of the pack of party-heartiers, preferring the company of just some
to the crowded panic of more, and more, and more, sardines packed cheek by jowl,
jump around and scream life day and night.
Bring out your dead, bang, bring out your living.
Guess it was sort of like before, and you were a game show winning
perfect match for the sentence imposed lockdown conditions
of a worldwide reminder that we can so easily kill each other just by being alive.
It was those parties where everyone is happy but you’re not,
a strange sensation to be an island of unhappiness amid a sea of joy,
but not unwelcome, you with
that insular Tahiti of the mind,
that feeling once you undertook your successful excavation out the door,
slipped out the tunnel from the noisy celebration of life, everyone left behind,
that you were by yourself, practicing social distancing,
and so lucky to be so,
you alone having escaped to tell, well, no one about it, thank you.
Lanning Lee 