Some shithead in the park
won’t stop playing bongos.
If ever there was an example
of selfishness in a pandemic,
it’d be this guy, subjecting
the neighbourhood to the sound
of one hippy social distancing.
He must be escaping the news.
Provincial prognostications today
put our death toll at thousands,
while the Feds handed delivery
of essential medical gear to Amazon.
As opposed to, say, Canada
Post, or any other company
where employees aren’t on
strike to protest their dangerous
post-pandemic working conditions.
It’s just no one else has Amazon’s
logistical capabilities – they’ve positioned
themselves above negligence.
Too big, as they say,
to fail. The same way
some patients are prioritized
over others according to
a checklist of survivability
factors when resources
get low – the upshot being
to forgo treatment to those
with less chance of survival.
Meaning if you live
under a bridge or have asthma
the ventilator goes to the person
more viable – more Amazon,
less Canada Post – which is not
the fault of medical workers
or the authors of these apocalyptic
ethical guidelines that someone
has to write – just that inequality
is a comorbidity. What Engels meant
by social murder. Deaths that seem
natural, occurring, say, from
a virus, but which are actually
unnatural, caused by largely unseen
factors, like poverty — but are
still murder. And though
no one would ever say
to a friend, never mind into
a microphone, that one human
could possibly be more important
than another, we accept this,
constantly, in our day to day,
just as we accept every government
in the world being caught
with their pants down, because,
we sense, they never quite felt
the pressure. It just wasn’t
going to be their families
going without a swab, nothing
in the storied ride of their
lives paved the way for this
possibility – which we accept, too,
the same way we accept
they can’t just say nothing
now, they have to say
something, just as we must
listen, there’s nothing else to do,
just as I must listen to
the bongo guy, there’s no place else
to go – I’d strangle him but
I’m not allowed outside –
I can only abandon my right
to care, trudge to my room,
tap the white noise machine,
and tumble to bed, where we all sleep
equal under the stars.