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3:AM in Lockdown 11: S.J. Fowler

C-Word
By SJ Fowler.

I don’t have a lot to say. I vacillate between sensations and have no strong opinion. It is obvious I am fortunate beyond belief or historical precedence, but I often feel this way anyway. No one, that I’ve seen, in literary terms, has anything interesting to say about it because the lockdown is happening to almost everyone. And those who are ill are best not evoked with stupid writing. Does it matter, as the internet is voluntary, that it all switches between patronising and panicking? I’m worried for some people I know. I’m alive to that and galvanised somewhat. I’m lucky. I cancelled a festival I was organising with over 100 poets who were coming to London from Spain, Italy, all over Europe. Six months dissembled in six days. But I am glad. Two of my family members are NHS or frontline etc… I like how no one has anything interesting to say and as much as I don’t like the articles on how important writing and literature is right now. But that’s just because it’s my job, those articles aren’t meant for me. There is something calming about perspective, for me at least. This is giving me that, though I’d not choose to learn now if I could.

“Another plague year would reconcile all these differences; a close conversing with death, or with diseases that threaten death, would scum off the gall from our tempers, remove the animosities among us, and bring us to see with differing eyes than those which we looked on things with before.”
– Daniel Defoe



c-word youtube comments mashup poem

let’s see what’s going on in good, sophisticated Europe
… takes you to Liverpool

then to a double room in London
a single stays in for twenty days
and goes bananas

one dude eats a bat in China, and suddenly I can’t leave my house
quote of the decade
because we won’t live to see many more quotes

Online advice;
you cannot be anything you want.
love doesn’t get the deal done.
gratitude is the only emotion that taps into a higher intelligence.
material world detaches from the spiritual.
worth comes from character.
the universe rewards authenticity.
adversity reveals character.
the new one who can pull all this off.

within the Diet Apocalypse
Expensive Shit begins to glow
like the food seen
chewing with an open mouth
despising the bbc website

“I’m not a paranoid person”
wears a Rolex in case you need to trade it for a getaway car

@stevenjfowler

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