Please keep your distance

I don’t want to catch anything from you

and I'm sure you feel the same way

staying indoors like a rained-off

summer holiday but this time

with endless advice on

how to fill our days as if

we can't be trusted to function

outside the tethered thinking

of workplace diktats

I tell you how I will spend my time

I will memorise the confusion

incompetence and untruths

that have led to this moment

while I fashion my response

among the sawdust of my lockdown lock-up

I will weaponise a disarticulated 

wooden garden chair leg

convert it into a crude war club

a coup stick for future skirmishes

over toilet paper and chocolate digestives

sand it a little

scrape a chisel along its length

adorn it with smart black Gorilla tape

and a libation of teak oil

a camouflaged and concealed weapon 

that still looks like a chair leg

as that was what it was made to be

ordinary domestic now deadly

like any household object

I choose it because its shape presents 

itself to me from among 

the other fractured wood

the flotsam of my materialism

because I assess that I might need it

to defend myself in the resistance

against the unelected 

super rich rulers of the world

the "supremacists"

the dark money and dirty companies