When the sunlight becomes my alarm clock, which I have not used for years after it replaced our dead dog and cat who had turned me into the punctual person I am seen to be, after a very short while I forget our town has transcended Shirley Jackson’s village, become the world-wide lottery it is now, I wake up. When my daughter and her boyfriend are stuck in Los Angeles, my middle son barely escaped from Mexico to Illinois, my oldest son’s specialty—on line education— becomes the only thing between family isolation and solitary confinement, I wake up. Spring was supposed to spring yesterday, but Winter refused to leave and the Cubs were to open the season next Saturday but might not ever play this year since my Dad threw me a baseball at three and took me to Wrigley as if it were Mecca till lung cancer... Last week was the birthday of the ex-girlfriend I was to marry until, waiting tables in college, I accidentally dumped lemonade on my future wife until breast cancer... Caught between a dreamless night and the creak of my bones as I dress, after a short while, a very short while, I wake up.
Originally published on Mike Maggio's Covid Poetry Site.