See the Fog

 

Have you seen the fog?

I mean the sea fog, the way it comes in

over the water like a cotton quilt moving slowly

but irresistibly toward us and downward

from a gray sky that drips cold and wet

but only in the form of the tiniest particles

of damp death.

When it comes close we feel the droplets condense

on the skin like a sticky dust or mist of paint.

It coats everything, covers everything, invades everything.

It attaches to everything.

It sticks to everything.

It encloses everything in a prison of clumped terror.

Life becomes overwhelmed with a fear

of all dreams lost, all hope lost,

a certainty that the soul dies before the body.

The sea fog is like fascism,

like parents killing their children,

like doctors and teachers and artists and

scientists being thrown onto mounds of burning print.

Like screams from hidden corners of the night,

like the cruel becoming rich, and the kind broken by poverty.

The fog thickens, becomes a sugary pudding, a paste, a glue

that stretches but holds everything together tightly

as though it were warm tar growing on people to become

a soft but insuperable prison of irreversible choice

caused by the hatred of others that floats abroad

like the sea fog of deliberate self-destruction chosen

as the means to pretend the source of the sea fog

is not the black slime of your own heart. 

"It is better to hate than be hated" the sea fog

whispers as it brushes over your dying skin,

your dying body, your dying mind, your dying race.

I can't move.  I can't breathe.

 

        John F. Manimas, February, 2023