This is a very dark poem and I admit to writing it as a way of banishing my share of guilt for having created this world for my children and grandchildren. It is my Father’s Day exorcism, a bleating presence struggling against the status quo.Plus, some Beat Farmers that fit.

Seeking Absolution

My
self
has been stripped
like a rusty bolthead, frozen unmoved.
The pandemic
has broken
my
‘me’
and I have
no other tools
to remove and replace
myself
with some other self.

So this ‘I’ says
and so this ‘I’ sits
in the zero black-coffee
morning,
cats pressing
against the keyboard
to create
a new username
and password.

These new identities
are controlled
by other regimes
of
lithium batteries,
apps,
touchscreens,
rattletrap rolling steel wheels from distant trains,
tinnitus of the postmodern,
echoes of color-coded states of emergency,
poxy sirens,
10 year-old children in cobalt mines.

Might as well
just ask for bullets
on Father’s Day
or a gun sale at the church,
might just as well.