Covid Poems

Poems written under the influence of Covid in Luzern Switzerland in 2021 and in New York 2023, with the exception of the pieces written in Iceland directly preCovid and in the Lisbon and Porto airports on a double Portuguese layover which resulted in essence to a Covid flashback. In 2021 there was much written about the paradigm shifting effects of the global pandemic, which didn’t really amount to anything .. Let's be honest, most of us just went back to doing whatever it was we were doing. I wanted to write directly from the Covid Head. I felt that I had actually tapped into the Covid Hive Mind ©. The second time I got Covid, my wife and I were driving from Key West to New York, so the text runs more like a Covid Road Poem, though the writing of it was like the antithesis of Google mapping, that is to say, non linear (come to think of it Google maps seems to change our directions mid trip to suit its own purposes). The writing of ‘The Drive from Key West to New York with Covid followed by the Monsoon’ was more like driving (sick) itself, a thousand miles away from anything resembling an ending, words and images rippling out through the poem like Dark Energy. This volume is philosophically grounded on Borges’ Dreamtigers, Kerouac’s Heaven, Maggie Nelson Bluets, Walser’s Masquerade, Clearly’s translation of The Secret of the Golden Flower, Rovelli’s theory of Loop Quantum Gravity, The Sopranos, and Blind Willie Mctell (the artist and the Dylan song).