John Gartland

Bring out your dead

There are some consolations in a plague year.
You’ve a polite excuse,
to duck unwelcome social invitations
to skip the banal drudgery
of self-opinionated company
of overbearing liberals
and pontificating radicals.

You’ve good reason to dodge
the intellectually occluded
and the patently deluded,
the would-be salon-keepers
and the throne-lickers and creepers,
the dipsomaniac ravers
and the posturing face-savers,
obsessive Trump-haters
and embittered second-raters,

the unregenerate hipsters,
and fatcat investors
narcissistic exhibitionists,
the wannabees and ego trips,
the drama’s failed protagonists,
all constipated scribblers and
football-obsessed dribblers,
those whom vanity disposes
and hypocrisy discloses
with each fatuous
pronouncement from their lips.

With all that said, bring out your dead.

It surely is a tonic to escape
these dull discourses.
What’s not to like
about a plague, apart
from quarantine and panic,
food shortages and corpses?