Feels So Good

NOTE TO THE READER: I penned this poem back during those bewildering first months of COVID, one of several saved-file dates is July 2020. Remember then? I’d thought to submit the poem to a few places at the time, although now I can’t imagine who would’ve taken it. But the death this week of Chuck Mangione kicked it back up to the surface of memory. And because “things take the time they take” (Mary Oliver), maybe now is the time to share it—to remember from a distance who we were then and who we are now, and yes, what remains true.

As with most things it wasn’t some single moment

in time when we realized our language had slipped

but more a hazy awareness that grew clearer with

each passing pandemic day until we looked at one

another from across the kitchen table and confessed

aloud together: Grief, we sure are saying fuck a lot.

And the clearer reality was we were—Fuck every bit of

this shelter in place! Fuck not being able to find yeast!

They canceled The Black Keys at Red Rocks? Fuck that!

To claim dropping F-bombs doesn’t really change things

is not sensually true because what’s been mandated away

from us is any semblance of say-so in our lives leaving

us, let’s face it, enraged. It causes us (even the peaceable)

to long to topple things or punch somebody’s lights out.

To pull the pin on F-U-C-K and hurl it into COVID’s

maw is pure catharsis ala Chuck Mangione: feels so good.

It causes a change in me. Fuck’s a Trojan horse rolling

from our lips filled with tiny soldiers wielding swords of

emotive meaning, in this case hoping to reclaim or at the

very least remember slivers of the ways we were (not to

be great again, but rather good). For the startleable, yes,

hearing the firecracker Fuck Zoom calls! can be startling.

But c’mon, we’re months into this fray with months to go.

Sound the flugel. Gird your face. Full fuck ahead we go.