I don't feel like being productive

I don’t feel like being productive

For pennies on the dollar

Inside like wearing a collar

This dog without a bone

In someone else’s home

Nowhere that I can roam

I don’t feel like taking your call

I miss you but I can’t focus

On what's here and now

I hear the ringing and wring my hands,

Frustration

I just want to go outside

I want my daughter to play

I want to work for pay

I want to hold my lover at night

I can’t and it’s killing me

caught in catastrophe

calamity of mass proportions

We are all lost and some are dying

Alone

And here inside locked up like a fairy tale

but who will come to save us?

Mirror, mirror on the wall

which one of us all lose it all?

My husband and partner both work in medicine

So I can’t be near them and I lost my connection

To the love that is touch

and closeness

and home

being somewhere else

with nowhere to roam

chained to the fence of time

the collar so tight

I bark to get free

but the whole world is barking

Like dogs in the night

we howl at the moon

its too far away and can’t take away the pain

Bow wow

bow down

so low

and yet

yesterday was almost normal

I don’t feel like being productive

for pennies on the dollar

I want my belly rubbed

and maybe, a little lower

Lower and louder

I miss being a shouter

Hollering from pleasure

and now just howling sadness on deaf ears

of the world, 

howling too

from our computers inside our dog houses

some better than others

and yet we complain

I have it good

and if this feels so bad

then what does it feel like to have it bad?

We all suffer

like we got mange and fleas

itching to be bathed and healed

hear our howls

jowls frothing

frosted over windows

that won’t open when you clap

clap for medical people

that help save the sick and dying

dying to go home 

and sleeping in their cars 

because they are contaminated

and they can hear us howl

as they cry out loud for normalcy

the volume getting louder

cacophonous world of dogs and crying medics

if the animals made a documentary

this would be the scene where all the chirping of humans mating and crying and the tension of

will the tiger-show kill us all with stupidity?

Stupidly, we waited too long to respond

So this thing grew like a tumor and

the cancer spread to the whole world

worried we wait and wonder

will we wake up in a new worldview

where people are provided for and medicine isn’t made for the rich?

ridiculous that if you have status

you can get tested for Covid

and if you are a doctor with a fever, you still have to go in

treat patients even if it kills you

your $300 thousand dollar medical debt will go onto your kids

your kids

alone on glowing screens

being schooled by terrified teachers with technology and time

But no guarantee for their future

Futile furrowed brows

Of feelings felt or not felt

Free to drink away the truth

Trauma waits beneath

Your vice delays it’s eruption

Our bodies volcanoes of trauma waiting to erupt

Error error

Enigmatic engines our brains begs for vices

Feed me

Cover over my circuitry

Circus inside when you give me my drug of choice

Food booze caffeine or screen 

So

I don’t feel like being productive