LUCY VALERIE GRAHAM

“But we perceived the infection kept chiefly in the out-parishes, which being very populous, and fuller also of poor, the distemper found more to prey upon than in the city, as I shall observe afterwards.”

Daniel Defoe – Journal of the Plague Year

I promised end-times doggerel
Which should be easy
As I’ve been blabbing about end-times shit for so long it has became passé
But now my penchant for such things seems paralysed

JG Ballard said: “Only the neurotics will survive the future”
All I know is that even the best neurotics
Won’t live very long without womxn
Because most men don’t know how to wash their hands properly
And now we have to teach them and bleach them

It’s tiring
Meanwhile
At the university
We’ve been told to teach our students online
So I’m trying to be creative about that and not resort to MOOCs
Which are truly the death of all critical consciousness
Though I’ve heard from a somewhat reliable source
That humanities departments themselves
Might be the death of all critical consciousness
So there is that to ponder
In the face of the apocalypse

I have a book to finish writing and too much marking
But on sunny days I mop
Up the vitamin D
And on gloomy days I clean the house endlessly
And cook
I swear this virus is giving me housewife psychosis

Endlessly
I distract myself

Because what do you write
When you see news coverage
Of mass burials on an island
In the North
On an island where for decades
They have buried the unclaimed,
Unnamed,
The homeless,
People of colour,
Who died –
Like Nat Nakasa
And Ernest Cole –

Of things like
Jumping
From towers (I’ve never liked that Tarot card),
Or from the pancreatic cancer
Caused by having to sit upright
All night
For warmth
In the subways
Of the greatest city on earth

Graves on Hart Island are usually
The work of prisoners
But now there are too many dead –
So men in white abattoir suits are digging the trenches
For the cheap wooden boxes,
For bodies suddenly rooted in an island
Unknown to their owners in life

What do you write when fascists,
Blond haired, blue eyed,
Many of them white trash
Fueled by narcissism and unconscious self-loathing
Round up the homeless,
The unclaimed,
People of colour,
Their roots in the heart
of this land,
And put them into tents,
A vast concentration camp,
On the cold ground –
In your own country?

When they use a national state of disaster
Not to demand the disaster box
For the gasping,
But to demand an extension of their force to do more violence
In a state of exception?

What do you say when the police live
Down to Walter Benjamin’s observation, when their existence
“bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence”
And when the military as the force of the state, becomes implicated?
Not ours to reason why –
Because our leaders tell us
We must go to war against this virus
(Just don’t mention the other war –
The atrocities
Against the citizenry)

What do you say when fascists all around the world drown
Out all sound
And then depart
The news conference
Leaving another
Politician
Or reporter
With their arms
Open
Waiting for answers

(Btw I am not sure that I agree with Lina Mounzer
In her Letter from Beirut
When she says
“In war… the violence is not arbitrary and without intent,
the way death by virus is”
Death by a virus can be absolutely full of intent
When you are governed by a denialist Dicktator and the virus is striking
Black people
And first nation peoples
The worst –
This is because of something called biopolitics,
“Making live and letting die”.
But let us also not forget that the most racist states
Are also the most suicidal –
So hold your nose and drink up your Clorox, my fascist love,
Here it’s called Jik,
Or in my grandmother’s day, Javel,
Prost!)

What do you say when you have to clean and clean the kitchen in isolation
While the male activists do the really important things
The endless Skype and zoom meetings
All the self-appointed
Messiahs, fervently believing
That they are solving the problems of the world
What do you write when the rate
Of transmission of the plague
Is apparently down under
Control

And the rate of domestic violence has gone through the fucking roof?

What do you say when your small sacrifice is choosing
With whom you are going to spend the lockdown
And whichever you choose
You know
You will dream of the other ones, the ones you have abandoned
That they will be conjured every night in your sleep

What do you write
When you know that this is what privilege feels like:
Being able to choose
With whom to spend a lockdown
That will be
Followed by another
Lockdown

When you know that more people than you know
Are being asked to make far greater sacrifices:
To endure hunger,
Immense precarity,
Forced proximity to inescapable abusers

And it doesn’t really help to see a cartoon
Of Dinosaurs
Seeing the asteroid
That was to tilt them into extinction
And them supposedly thinking “Oh shit, the economy…”
Because these are end times –
And people really are going to die

Of hunger
Of the violence of men
As well as of
The plague

In our reptilian brain
Called the amygdala,
The part that is always watchful,
Fearful, waiting for fight
Or flight,
We all knew it was coming,
That everything is finite,
And besides that
We’ve seen all the movies –

And we’ve glimpsed a post-human world
Through fellow creatures who have taken over
Our highways and byways and waterways.

We already knew that this
Was inevitable
When we witnessed the invisible roots
Of trees swelling and pushing up tar
In neglected suburbs

And yet still we disavow, we do not want
To know
That where we will go
Will not be the same

On account of being cynical I believe
That capitalism will survive
As long as humans exist
Like a cockroach
It will eat this virus and emerge stronger,
It subsumes
Everything,
Because at the end of the day
People just want to get paid
So they can eat
And buy some stuff again

Meanwhile Cuba, the only half-way socialist state left,
Exports doctors to old Europe
And to us here in the south of
Afrika,
While the Saudi Royal family, always already sick,
But now truly stricken with the plague,
Calls for a pause
On bombing Yemen

Flattening the curve used to be something like
A diet
That encouraged anorexia
Now, like anorexia,
For many it means being without food
Being without family
Or being too close to family
For too long
Though in this time of pestilence the referent has slipped
Into something even more left-handed
More demanding, communal,
And eventually
Less middle-class

Here in the South
Are we behind the curve?
Is this the proverbial calm before the storm?

What happens to the curve when it slouches beyond the city
Into the outer parishes?

And what is on the other side
Of the curve?

What lies
In wait there?