Once, back in the world before, when three people on the street were just
three people on the street, I told my doctor my OCD was so bad
I wanted to kill myself. She was unperturbed, until I admitted
to drinking twenty drinks a week. Then she was apoplectic.
She didn’t even see the correlation.
Like drinking wasn’t just one of many drainpipes
I’d shimmy to escape the room of my mind
and prance the fields of oblivion.
When people joke about the liquor store being an essential service
I think of what the echo chamber of my living room would be
without Prozac and remember
a virus is just one of a billion ways to die.
If you see a duo walking the park and can’t stop yourself
from shoving a hockey stick between their hips, if you’re pissed off
at the tennis playing kids who aren’t your kids and are probably
siblings anyways, if you see a group of five angled
six feet each off a picnic table and get all high and mighty
cause that’s not how it works, please remember
responsibility isn’t a Platonic form.
If we love Science we must also love how it’s proven shame
to be an ineffective social deterrent. If we trust in statistics
we must acknowledge the escalation of domestic
abuse in a pandemic. If we believe in social distance the homeless
shouldn’t be packed into makeshift shelters to save
the reputations of empty hotels.
It isn’t mutually exclusive to stay home and have compassion
for the infinite reasons others might not. If you don’t like that,
you should have fixed the world before it broke.