Erase + Covid + Guitar Colours (Photo)

Written as a Submission to The Mass whose January Edition focuses on the word erase. I used to work as an Advocate and it was usually a fruitless exercise to support someone to get a health report changed. We managed it sometimes but usually with the proviso that the words remained in some form somewhere.

Erase

Erase
The word full page
With vomited labels
And snarky insinuation
Calling

More names
Criticisms
Mad Doctors assessments
And defamatory statements
Hounding

Sad folk
With histories
They wish they didn’t have
And which the law won’t allow to
Perish

We die
With less written
On black marble tombstones
Bare essentials covering lives
We lived

As full
Human beings
Who have more about them
Than spiteful words can ever tell
Us of

Richard Downes
21st January 2021
(From the 100 meters series)

I have a workshop coming up on covid and its impact on disabled people. I found something that was described as a fun exercise that helps you to get in touch with your feelings. Choose a word…

Covid

Covid on your street
Bipeds walking support it
Perambulating

Sniffing out your fear
Desirous of your contact
Red ball with black hooks

Loves nasal passages
Changing the pace of your breath
Mucus multiplys

Trachea transports
By windpipe inhalation
To the bronchial

phlegm, malign green friend
already resident there
welcomes the jackal

who knocks in winter
more so even than summer
adores the harsh frost

eats the flesh remains
of obese diabetics
this spectre at feast

disdaining mocking
conspiracy theorists
libertarians

lost politicians
who deny its existence
or its goodbye bell

tolling silently
delighting in blood curdling
nibbles on organs

laughing at doctors
medicines, inhalors, nurses
doing its worse

listens for ceasing
of the beating of your heart
Ecstatic. Dead. Done.

Richard Downes
21st Jaunary 2021
(From the 100 Meters series)