Adrian Brijbassi

You and me, we shiver
On the eve of June’s heat,
As tears river, we fear winter will never cease
A reaper in blue sheaves the light,
While I follow your clang on a catwalk above a city’s strife
A fire ignites a mile to the right,
Bones crack beneath a nightstick’s might,
Now we know treachery is here as the moon kites,
Marches peaceful descend to devil’s delight
When a pompous tweet arrives to prod and kindle,
Extending fate’s fiendish plight
‘Where is hope?’ you ask,
Upon the sight of mischiefs in the dark,
Sweeping Liberty into its night

‘It only gets worse,’ I fear,
All is stark, this doom that alights,
Pen strokes blister with a torrent,
Wicked malice writ under the cover of juris,
A plague festers and poverty peaks
And our best ally — the Hope you seek — is in retreat

‘How does sanity prevail against Boogaloo freaks?’
‘Madness won, we have nowhere to sneak,’
I lament as our feet dangle over Banks Street,
‘A wish,’ you say, ‘would be to see Earth some other day’
‘Then,’ I remind, ‘we would only be turning away.’

Twenty-Twenty is vision to witness,
For you and me to share in grief,
Observing humanity’s knee-bent defeat,
To hear its peals for Enlightenment,
An elusive tonic for the menaces
we can’t seem to beat

(Written in June, during BLM protests; the themes remain relevant following the siege on the U.S. Capitol)

Revelry will be ours,
In Tiber too,
When madness ebbs and the hunger game ends
With a dance that tests your bravery to embrace
A future not so grim
It will be yours and hers,
Theirs and his,
All of ours, made to exist in a perpetual six-foot Inferno 
of I-Can’t-Take-Any-More-of-This

We are The Pandemics,
Providers of history’s next chapter on Who’d-a-Guessed?
The Hoaxsters and The Immortals
whose fearlessness against fact enshrines them 
as eternity’s dopey jests
The Soothsayers and Doomsdayers
who will forever own this hollow win
The Sirens of Science and Heroes of Medicine
a battalion of goodness semaphoring the blind
The Dead, The Dead, The Dead,
buried, too many, without adulation, nor grace, nor light

We are the victims of hubris and Trump,
Textbook fools who could’ve and should’ve
To dodge peril, duck disgrace
In hope’s horizon, the torment stems,
and we rejoice again,
Speaking words of wisdom
while stomping a microscopic fiend to the beat,
A group, we caress, 
Our circle of backs still bristles from the chill

We pause at dawn, here and there,
New Rochelle and Bergamo,
Wuhan and El Paso,
At last, it is gone,
Yet we cling in silence, each of us wary
of what one cool droplet, a splash of water
from a neighbor’s pore, might again cause