FATIGUED

You stare at yourself in the mirror
Your eyes red, your hair distressed,
You’re not smiling, You’re fatigued.
You’re in the middle of a another
lockdown, another surge,
another day of teleconferences,
one after the other over
and over ad nauseam.
another day of fretting
over politics, another day
of mourning over murders,
another day of hearing
talking heads, another
day of strident division,
another day of children
—fatigued too, at home
all day, all night, all week.

“This is exhausting,” you
mutter to yourself. You just
want to remove your face mask
and sit in a room crowded with
a thousand mask-less people
and declare your freedom.
But your common sense
appears and annoys you.
You realize you are in a tsunami.
You realize you must stand down
from errant and misguided notions.
You realize you must let this tsunami
pass, and deal with the aftermath
and the ruin and the wreckage for
a while and a while and a while.

You sweat from the strain of
your rumination, you sit down,
you point the remote at the tube
once again, the news is on and
you hear breaking news:
Vaccination is ninety-five
percent effective. Sunlight
streams through the vent your
curtains. You lift your sorrow
drenched head. Grateful.