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Back to Basics

I know this wienie,
he doesn’t read, or
hasn’t in quite some
time. He used to. In

fact he’d keep an on
going list of every sin
gle book he ever read,
alphabetically by author.

I’ve got it here some
where. Then a year into
what we now seem to
lovingly call the pandemic,

he caught it, that scary
thing that isolated most
of us, this guy who used
to read. Covid. His case

was special, as it turns
out, because in the middle
of living through the aches
and the fevers and the scary

unknown and not being able
to smell anything (that’s how
he knew, before he got his
test, he opened a brand new

half gallon plastic bottle of
Pine-Sol, put his nose right
at the mouth of the bottle
where the lid had been and

took a deep whiff and smelled
absolutely nothing. Whoa! he
thought). But then he was also
getting up every hour having

to pee. And he also found him
self with an insatiable thirst, a
constant; he could drink as much
of anything at all and yet couldn’t

be quenched. And, the worst of
the worst, he’d wake up of a morn
ing and pull out a book, like usual,
and the words on the page were

nothing but a blur. Now that was
weird. And it really hasn’t changed
for him since. Despite the fact that
he was very shortly after recovering

from Covid diagnosed with diabetes,
hence all the random and more dia
betic-like symptoms. He visited an
ophthalmologist, got a new prescrip

tion for his glasses lenses, tried bi
focals and the newfangled alter
natives. But still, he wakes of a
morning, can see nothing much

but a blur on the page or screen 

until he cleans his glasses and 

screws up his head and puts his 

nose in the book or on the screen.

Well, Fuck that! I heard him
say several years into this,
having not read a book for
over a year and a half, or

not finished one, at least.
And so tonight he tells me
that he just finished reading
a book of poetry for the first

time since the pandemic, as
he lovingly calls that time-
period in which he got
Covid, diabetes, laid off

from his first full-time job 

in a decade and stopped
reading for a few years.