lifestyle musings of a literary clown (4)

Vaccinated lifestyle

I got my second shot on Monday, and it didn’t take long for the tears to come. I cried more when my parents got vaccinated, but still, it was an emotional day. Inspired and delirious (the second shot didn’t make me sick so much as super sleepy and filled with this inescapable brain fog.) I wrote a few poems. 

Second Shot 

Gaga’s “Chromatica II” into  “911”

Only it’s just me

Waiting 

To get my second shot

Phizer (EN 8731 Expires 7/31/21)

In a barn

Normally reserved for cows

At the fairground 

In Ulster County

Which, frankly, feels fitting. 

Country boy 

With a clowns soul

Waiting patiently

For a small prick.

Syringe (The text is below if it’s more accessible for you to read.) 

Covid made me afraid 

To hug those, I love

Mine breath could be death

A cough on the subway

Sending me into a spiral 

Of regret

Did I really need

To go to the grocery store?

What’s eating anyway?

Then science

Pfizer, the vaccine supplier

And Dolly Parton

A modern angel for Moderna

Brought light

To a calendar 

Of social dismay

Maybe in late May

I’ll hug 

Those I love

Again 

This next poem has nothing to do with being vaccinated. This week the police executed another Black man for the crime of being Black. It happened 10 miles from where the murderer of George Floyd is on trial. I process with poetry.

ACAB

An air freshener,

Loosely hanging on a rearview mirror. 

Law states you can’t have that in Brooklyn, 

City.

Or was it that he was driving while Black?

Past a cop, Kimberly Anne Porter.

Sitting in her car, snuggled up to her hate.

Arresting him was the ‘intent’ supposedly.

Relieving him of his liberty.

Eager to put another Black man in prison.

But he never got there. He was executed.

Attacked for the crime of being himself.

Shot dead. “I thought it was a 

Taser!?” She said in defense.

After 26 years on the force, you think she’d know what a gun was.

Rest in power,

Daunte Demetrius Wright.

Say his name.