last night i dreamt I tugged out my heart
& showed a pharmacist
who calmly showed me another
pale, it revealed mine alive still

we all learn the word myocardial
arrhythmic stutters could be viral
anxious grasping for breath
& fatigue, a cellular exhaustion

we're painfully longing to touch
the paradox of isolating to survive
is this hard wired need to connect
viruses know how to multiply

in the early days I recall Kali
grinning at me with her necklace of skulls
alone I was more aware
the vast scale of time & us

a nanosecond, a leaf fall.

How's that for a bit of morbid Christmas poetry? But the thing is with poems, you can't stop them when they come. Many of mine begin with an image from a dream. I was literally holding my heart in my palms showing Anan, our local pharmacist, who was reassuring me that mine had a fair few beats in it, and I just had to look after it. I think I'd been worried as it had been fluttering a little and I'm at the age that heart issues can occur. Of course, your subconcious is going to throw you a problem and answer it in a dream. You know how to heal yourself - you just have to listen.

Why was I worrying about my heart? My sister had a heart attack at 38 and Dad had one too. My family keep telling me to get my heart checked but I don't know what that would achieve. But sometimes if I've overdone things - eating, drinking, living - my heart is loud and fluttery, and I get paranoid.

I then got to thinking about how the pandemic got us worrying all the time about the symptoms of COVID, but half of the symptoms are what the times throw at us anyway - they're making us anxious when we have no need to be. There's many things in this world that make us sick, the media being one of them, let alone work stress and binge drinking. And Christmas pudding. That'll do it as well.

We were talking in the shower this morning about the early days of the virus when people were scared of parcel deliveries in case the virus lingered on Amazon cardboard boxes. People believed that you could get it patting someones dog. One story described villagers wanting to ban cyclicts going through their village lest they be sprayed with sweat and COVID loaded heavy breathing. Our taxi driver in India believed you could stop it dead with a raw onion. Let's not even mention the bleach. I wonder about our life expectancy now, with all this stacking on of fear. It seems even living and dying isn't ours anymore. These rights belong to governments and pharamceutical companies, more so now than ever.

And on Facebook, people were complaining about Macdonalds not being open on Christmas Day, and that their ordered lobster from a local supplier was a kilo undersize, and that they'd eaten and drunk far too much over Christmas. But it'll be COVID that kills us, so 'do the right thing'. A jumper that says 'I've been vaccinated' pops up in my feed. Virtue signalling is the new black.

I'm not sure how many heart beats I have left. But I'm done with paying attention to this bollocks. I take a deep breath, feeling the space that my rib cage makes, and go outside to watch cloud poetry. It makes more sense that all of this.