On lockdown orders we crawled into our houses
With our stacks of toilet paper and hand sanitizer
Our streaming TV and TikTok
And we died in there
Like badgers gassed in our burrows
When our ghosts emerged, they tried to imitate the world as it had been
To make things right and whole
But it was the shell of a world
And all the pretending would not fix what had been
The people could no longer talk to each other
What was effortless and simple
Was now difficult and complicated
Reason was gone
Replaced with with emotion and vitriol
A species at war with itself and the idea of civility
The longer we pretended, the more wrong it all felt
The more our world decayed and broke down around us
Longing for the good old days
When the days were not what had left
The dead have no momentum
And while there was nobody to eulogize the human race
The ghosts of lockdown went on with the pretense
Any excuse for emotion and connection
Even the bad, the negative, and the toxic
You never know what you’ve lost until it’s gone
This was never more true than for human beings
Not the death of a society but the death of society
A race too stupid to know that the end had come and gone
The putrefaction extended to truth and the sense of right and wrong
No need for justice when entertainment rules
Faces illuminated by the detritus from the websites of billionaires
Dreaming of walking in shopping malls like the Dawn of the Dead
A fit of pique inheriting the earth at the end of days
Word Outlet 