PAD Day 3: Sorry to Bring Down the Room, but...

... it's taking a while to blow through these feelings of anxiety and depression over our current situation, so my poem today is reflective of that. I promise I'll eventually produce something more amusing or uplifting. Today's prompts from Poetic Asides and NaPoWri Mo are (1) Write a poem titled "Follow _____", and (2) Make a list of ten words using any source, random or otherwise, then use a site called Rhymezone to get a few rhyming or near-rhyming words for each one, then use that word bank to write a poem. (You don't have to use every word in the bank.) I went to my "go-to" site for the random words (The Sunday Whirl) and I got these: maze, trapped, land, hand, stash, chatter, armed, wreck, saw, crawl, back, last. i used them all, with some other words suggested by Rhymezone, to come up with this:

Follow the Maze

Trapped in a shut-down land

where one hand washes the other -

in the basement, a toilet-paper stash.

TV chatter that after a while

doesn't even matter,

armed to the teeth with numbers, numbers -

and an amazingly bureaucratic wreck

that can't get out of a corn maze

with a chain saw, everything slowed

to a crawl. People need breathing room

and machines, and their jobs back,

and cash back, and no more fear

of inhaling someone else's bad air.

But the last buck just got passed back

to the one who had it first,

and someone who squirmed past me

may have just passed me their germ.