I feel so unprepared 
for a detonation
that arrives in slow motion.

So when I hear you wringing your hands
as your inability to kiss everyone
amounts to civilization closing its curtains.

That, to be perfectly honest,
is fucking horseshit.

When someone walks into the street 
to give you a necessary distance
in the midst of global crisis,
maybe it’s because they care.

A plague clarifies things:
there’s little more to love
than being held in high regard.

So instead of love, 
I worry about logistics chains 
and the way that my grocery order
only dumps risk onto someone else
even as my neighbour texts
about their kid’s symptoms.

About the abstract pressures
on the bodies of front line workers
intensified by capital’s desire
to monopolize the ways I can care
through my consumer desires.

Getting all affective about
who you can and can’t kiss
in the middle of a pandemic
is a sure sign of compulsory sexuality.

Another sign is the chorus
of the Kenny Loggins/
Melissa Manchester duet
“Whenever I Call You ‘Friend’”
that ends with the lyric:
I know forever we’ll be doin’ it.

If we truly cared about one another
we’d be demanding 
the cancellation of debt
and the redistribution of income.

Instead, soon we’ll be out here
paying for the right to a job.

And even when I bristle 
at the thought that romance 
is a solution to no romance,
everything is just a mid-tempo ballad,
because that’s all we can handle?

Remember when the fact
that Australia was on fire
just seemed like more information?

It’s tempting to dismiss 
one line of thinking in favour 
of another that seems more urgent, but
all of these intimacies tug at one another
like a net scraping the ocean floor.

The smoke filling the air 
of Downtown Vancouver
touches your lips too.

When smoke gets in your lungs like
the half hour wait to buy
bread and frozen broccoli
at the Shoppers Drug Mart.

Just doing my part
to bottom for the economy.

Insert blowjob image
for queer authenticity, or
swap with joke about
social reproduction
depending on audience?

Maybe some both sides rhetoric
like how come no one
asked the fire’s opinion?

The illumination of the room on fire
just the lamp of inspiration being lit
and the problem of how this infecting light 
enters the isolating body 
is the problem of all critical theory.

But please text your critique
after you’ve dropped 
the inspiration off on the porch.

In this example,
inspiration is an allegory
for groceries.

I bring the snacks into my body
according to the following procedure:
first, the high tier trash (chips, ramen noodles),
then, the real food (apples, cheese),
and, finally, the low tier trash (crackers, dry cereal).

What good is poetry to reflect
on this panacea of stress eating?

Like the cartoon pig and his donuts,
this poem could go on forever
or at least as long as
I can sit here mumbling to myself.

Whatever you do
don’t get lonely on main.