day TWELVE HUNDRED and SEVENTY SEVEN

the great american pandemic poem

sitting here

trying to write

about the great american pandemic poem

but where to start?

government apathey and maleficence

the gop death cult

or simply death itself?

138 thousand of us gone

at the time of this writing

the most in the world

and i think i finally understand

what american exceptionalism is all about

truth be told

i don’t want to be writing

the great american pandemic poem

i want to be at a ballgame or a bar

or pissing away my free time

in a bookstore or at a movie

you know…the shit we all used to do

i want to be in paris or berlin

watching deer roam on the island of miyajima

this poem isn’t even that great

all i’ve done in it

is throw out some statistics and bitch

name drop some places scattered all over the world

and all i’m going to do

for the rest of this poem

is feel bad for myself

write about how dumb and selfish

americans are

what a worthless piece of shit donald trump is

while i call him a bunch of names

then let the poem peter out

like most of my other poems

have a tendency to do

because ending a poem is hard

i’d rather be writing about

some lunatic at my job

that dog that won’t stop barking

or that car alarm that won’t shut off

that woman who smokes

in front of my living room window

instead of anywhere else

in the entire universe

but all i notice

is that the dog owner and the smoker

aren’t wearing their masks

and i don’t really

miss my job at all

i miss the triviality in a line, though

i hate contemplating my mortality

the complex and profound

i’m true red, white and blue in that way

and i hate this pandemic

i hate its stupid name

and number

i hate that there are 138 thousand of us gone

that our ignorant

rapist, racist misogynistic

kremlin owned

baby-dicked president

only cares about the stock market

and his own inflated vanity

while dead bodies sit in cooling vans

i hate that americans

are too selfish or pig ignorant

to put on a mask

or consider somebody else

if only for a moment, a few days,

or a few weeks

i hate that getting your haircut

seeing some super hero movie

and going to disney

are all more important

than whether or not your neighbor dies

or spends the rest of their life

with a fucked-up lung

i’ve grown to hate a lot of things these days

like trying

to write

a poem

about a pandemic

the great american pandemic

the greatest, most beautiful american pandemic

that pandemicing has ever seen

the kind of pandemic

that we should drape in the american flag

finally claim it

call it

our own.           

--John Grochalski