After The Plague Poem by Doug Lane

"History never repeats itself. But it rhymes." - -Anonymous

After the plague
everyone went mad
for hugging
and slow dancing
and French kissing.

They just couldn't get
close enough.
There were
swinger clubs
where people did
nothing but cuddle.

After so much distance
cuddling seemed almost
insanely intimate.
The joining of genitalia
and various other orifices
was too close
for most
to bear
after years
of CDC enforced chastity.

People hung out
almost anywhere
but under their own lonely roofs.

They slept in city parks
and on wharfs and piers
and on the decks of freighters
and aircraft carriers
and on the roofs of high rises
and in convention centers
and sports stadiums
and in bus stations, train stations. and air terminals.

Hundreds and thousands
of people sleeping together
and dreaming together.

Zoom went bankrupt.
People were sick
of virtual images of each other.

They wanted to smell and touch
and hear
the real thing
- - even farts, and armpits, and snoring, and dandruff, and toejam.
All the people
who retreated
to the suburbs
crammed back into the urban centers,
cheek by jowl.

Day and night
people couldn't get enough
of each other.

Until finally they did.
They began to yearn
for a balance
between the old hermit life
and the new crowd life.

They so relished
their own privacy
that many mates divorced.
Children divorced their parents, as well.
And grandparents divorced their grandchildren,
great grand uncles and aunts
divorced their great nephews and nieces.
Third cousins twice removed
divorced their third cousins twice removed,
especially in Arkansas.

Cults of nostalgia
for the old plague days
sprang up.
The cultists wore masks,
and constantly washed their
hands and faces
to celebrate
the old rituals

and yearned
for the lightly trafficked
streets
of the lost pandemic.

Nobody was entirely happy
with this new situation.
Millions lived in expectation
of an onslaught
by a new virus,
seemed to live for it,
expected to be
rescued by it
or destroyed by it.

Sure enough,
a few years later
a new mutant virus struck.

The symptoms
were a shocker.
People became uncontrollably candid
with one another.
They told each other
the baldest, most unbearable,
truths.

Truthtellers, and that included virtually everyone,
for the new virus was very infectious,
often got their tongues cut out
as payback
for their insufferable candor.

Most of the human race
retreated from one another
rather than risking hearing
the painful truths
about themselves.

The unmitigated truth
became so unwelcome
that humans all but stopped
communicating with one another.

Fortunately, they continued
essential services like the Post Office,
super markets, dentistry, and
plumbing.
But they scarcely conversed
while giving or receiving
these essential services.

Language itself
got a bad name.

They prayed by the billions
that the next mutant virus
would induce people
to tell white lies.
Without the lubrication
of those lies,
millions and millions
of those lies,
it was clear
the human race
was not long
for this world.

Political parties formed around
the concepts of various lies.
There was the White Lie Party,
whose motto was
"Can't we just learn to get along
- - with the help of little white lies? "

There was the Big Lie Party,
devoted to asserting the opposite
of whatever was the truth
and reasserting it and repeating it
again and again,
ad infinitum, ad nauseum, ex nhilio.

There was the Black Truth Party,
devoted to exhuming, reviving, discovering, broadcasting
truths so painful
many citizens found them unbearable.

And there was the Black Lie Party,
devoted to propagating
the most destructive and outlandish lies imaginable.
The Black Lie Party, of course,
was the natural ally
of the Big Lie Party.

When the Truthteller Virus passed,
the nation was more blasted
than it had been,
after the Civil War.

Citizens mutually agreed
to abandon concepts
like truth and lies, facts and fakes,
reason and unreason, conmen and saints,
and even language itself.

The human race,
battered as it was,
sank several rungs
below chimps and gorillas
and orangutans
and even koalas and sloths,
on the evolutionary and cultural
ladders.

Doctors and experts in disease control
no longer existed.
The descendants of homo sapiens
would have lived
in unholy terror
of the onset
of a new mutant virus,
but medical history
was lost to them.

Ignorance was bliss,
a risky bliss indeed.
They fumbled through each day,
utterly vulnerable to the
inevitable coming viral invasion,

just as did millions of Americans
in the 4th year
of the Trump Administration.