2020 x p

Every years, Pantone selects a colour of the year. A dictionary chooses a single word or phrase. I think we ought to plot smaller than that. I think we should concern ourselves with the alphabet. I propose we start with one letter; I propose 'P'.

1. We can talk about the word I hate the most: politics. As in protests - packed streets of pedestrians waving around the paraphernalia of the disenfranchised, the downtrodden, they descend onto the pavement like tiny pellets, mere drops of precipitation. Their desperate pleas fall on the putrid, tiny orange ears of the forty-fifth and his pyrotechnics of deception.

2. Plumes and ashen skies, debris floating from one edge of the coast to the next, over plains, and bridges. Somewhere, there is a prophecy of all that fire. And He who pledges the fire also portends it, and so we who set the fire fulfil it. So when the dust settles, and the population recedes, and the Pacific folds into the Atlantic, and the scorched Earth is but a palimpsest, then when Peter asks, "Who by Fire?", we'll all say, "yes, yes, and it was horrible."

3. Hunger pangs? I never knew them. Please disregard my pantry's lined shelves, and the portliness of my convex belly. Leave it to the activists to portray the protuberant bellies, the bloated bodies, the skeletal physiques.

4. What about this pandemic? What about the promise of the pharmaceutical, the prospect of a cure, of health and prosperity?

5. So you see it too? This precipice? Over the peak, the edge: you see it in the inconsistent parabola at the shore's end, the unsteady skies. The plump, fetid machine pounds out its last products, pregnant with longing and hope, and we the progeny, the period, and the postpartum.

Now then, cup your hands like a pair of parentheses and peep into the window, into the perennial affliction that is the human condition, the complex, the void in which Plato's shapeless primal chaos awaits, a hostless parasite.