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Steve Fried
"How long will the epidemic last?'' I enquired. ``As long as we can keep it going. . . . And yes . . . maybe the aftosa will break out in South America,'' he said dreamily.

--William S, Burroughs                                             
DEPOSITION: Testimony Concerning A Sickness
The British Journal of Addiction 53.2 (1956): 119-13



3/15 ides
Safety is history.
Our next five days will tell us
about our next five


Chinese robots spray,
hand out sanitizer cloths.
Steel joints whirr and lock


3/17
Coronavirus
and global agribusiness
hold hands on our grave


3/18
chronic corona
minds eat the body alive.
Masks and gloves litter


3/19
crematoria
cemeteries open late
funerals empty


3/21
what "existential"
and "exponential" each means
in one hard lesson


3/23
pornography sites
hawk "Quarantine Customs" sales
wheels of delay spin


3/25
cabin feverish
fury serves up antidotes
to social distance


3/28
statistics lie low.
A good imagination's
your worst enemy


3/29
Samaritan Purse
hates gays, choice, science. staffs our
park's tent hospital


3/31
New York's Cuomo bids
for auctioned respirators.
FEMA outbids him


4/1 kalends
Zoombombed! Nationalist
penises and swastikas
crash virtual Seders


4/2
Arundhati Roy
"Pandemic is a Portal"
to a rescued world


4/3
Hindu nationalists
prescribe cow shit/piss cures. Their
exiled serfs crowd roads


4/4
India's rulers
accuse: "Corona Jihad:"
Nazi's "Jew Typhus"


4/5 nones
refrigerator
trucks, now morgues, preserve corpses
from our new weather


4/6
China's wet markets
reopen Easter Sunday
resurrection blues 


4/7
scared, self-imprisoned
witnesses watch bad news. Pale
peach blooms fill and fall


4/9
Instacart "tip
baiters'" fake incentive: your
risk shops for their food


4/11
harrowing of Hell:
epidemiologists
hunt antibodies


4/12
Ghost immunity
of convalescent plasma
"We just don't know yet"


4/13 ides
newsbreaks fill with songs
of famous fatalities.
muted horn solos


4/14
How many species
exited today, how many riders
ranging for live ones?


4/15
''The truth about us -- ...
an excrement of some sky...
no one to drive the car"


4/16
coal plants get carte blanche
on mecury emissions
-- green power, nothing


4/17
Women heal the world
their nations are the safest
citizens least sick


4/18
Florida beaches fill
then the crematoria
with right to diers


4/19
The Insurrection Act
or Posse Comitatus?
Who will wear the crown?


4/20
southwest "megadrought":
crop fails, wildfires, cities' thirst.
Those points keep tipping


4/21
oil's barrel price drops
40 below zero. We
pay and pay and pay


4/22 Earth Day
Horse 1 carries Plague,
Conquest, brings War. Gaunt
Famine sculpts Death's dream


4/23
Nobody's watching
so the Amazon burns faster:
planet's lungs on fire


4/24a
mainline Lysol, flood
our insides with bright UV
our President quacks


4/24b
Chinese suck mad bats'
blood, eat anteater ass,
Homeland sec chimes in


4/27
quarantined divorce
litters idle hands' playground
shoot your viral load


4/28
Mexico femicides
up a third since victims
sheltered with killers


4/29
Secret body piles
rot to surreal numbers un-
refrigerated


4/30 (Xref 5/14)
these horror stories
approach the real's asymptote
but disbelief holds


5/1 Kalends
could respirator
deaths be avoided by home
pulse oximetry?


5/5
Gilead corners
the remdesavir market
profiteers of plague


5/6
Got those covid toes
'fraid they'll rise up in my nose
Save me covid blues


5/7 Nones
Got those food blues too
Fat up on junk and stupid
Feed me covid blues 


5/8
Laurie Garret's now
our Cassandra of contagion
"Endemic" "36 months"


5/9
Defenestrations:
3 Russian doctors' free speech
gets thrown out windows


5/12
Scared new world
opens spaces where rats nest
in idled cars, sharp dreams


5/14 (Xref 4/30)
Hospital wards'
too fulsome hero stories
cover harsh downsides


5/14 Ides
We as dinosaurs,
roar rage at smaller mammals
while going extinct.


5/21
When Zuckerberg says
"We take that content down," he
means what hurts business


5/22
Light shows from beneath
doors to a room unopened
better centuries


5/23
Vaccine hopefulness
collides with nature. Wishful
thinking's not magic


5/24a
An electorate
majority mentally ill
crazy shit follows


5/24b
Rich get witchier
conjure profit from losses,
joy from our grief's tears


5/25
Chomsky: Trump win an
"indescribable disaster"
--just one of many


5/27
Virtual college,
 of doubtful use to most students
markets enrollment.


5/30
Nausea of homeland's
slow failed state tailspin stains
our sickbed yellow


5/31
Backed-up pork sources
live-roast, smother pigs en masse:
presage our futures?


{wl:}
viral irony:
to nature's immune system
we're the pathogen


tomorrow
Buddhist sand painting:
vivid reds blues yellows swirl
-- breeze blows us away