Hi.

I’ve really struggled to write anything on here.

I’ve really struggled full stop, to be honest.

Everything looks the same but feels different.

The world has twisted and we’re seeing it distorted from a new angle, where nothing has quite the same meaning any more – even words. So it’s been hard to use them.

I’m lost for words… and lost in them.

Everything I write is all peaks and troughs and seems irrelevant, either narrow and selfish or wide and wild. The weights are all wrong and off kilter. There’s this whole new language – from ‘coronavirus’ to ‘social distancing’.

And then old words I thought I knew mean different things now. Teacher. Doctor. Unprecedented. News. Connect. Lonely. We all understand them differently than we did just six weeks ago. We thought we knew what ‘isolation’ and ‘quarantine’ meant – but now we can FEEL them. Now we really know them. And we wish we didn’t.

We say to children, don’t we, when they are in heightened emotion – we say: ‘Use your words’. And I want to – but words have changed for me. They look and feel different, in my head and heart and mouth, on paper, because EVERYTHING looks different. Which is where this poem came from, I suppose.

I AM writing, because that’s how I make sense of things. And this is all so non-sensical. Sense, but less – but also sense-full because all my senses are all on full alert at the same time… And that’s exactly it. New raw eyes on old words, which are suddenly full of new gaps and meanings. Where sign, signifier and signified have been exploded. (Either that, or the poem came from trying to teach phonics and do **shudder** ‘Fred Talk’ with a five year old who seems to have a vested interest in illiteracy).

Pan-dem-ic

I would like to fry you

in a pan

make you fam-iliar

break you

up

beaten

like a pan-cake

a head-ache

a cough

flip you

off

scoff at you –

scoff you

whole

starting with the holes

you made

every –

where.

Dem is fighting words

fright-end words

because you are en-dem-ic

end-emic

you end,

every –

thing

one

we knew

a dem-i-god

of death and indoors

causer

of the big pause

–

tick

ick

I

C

you

and you make me sick,

pan-dem-ic.

I suppose if there is good to come out of all of this it is in the fact we are all collectively seeing things so differently – up to and including words. We all have new eyes.

And that disorientation, that space – the lift of the stomach before we plummet – might be uncomfortable, but it also makes this ROOM to grow, and innovate, and ultimately to change.

Once we have ‘survive’ under our belts, it’s up to us to choose what we do with the new perspective we’ve been given.

It’s up to us to break down and break up what we thought we knew, decide what’s important, and rebuild ourselves, rewrite our values, our families, our communities, our society.

And choose new words and ways to frame it all. New signifiers for what’s really significant.

I hope you’re all ok. God, I hope I’m okay. It’s hard to tell, sometimes, isn’t it?

Much love.

Xx