Crack! thunder over head

Flash crackle of lightning

The gods unsaid:

Stretch your words across the sky

Illuminate the stark, skeletal, high

Trees of another northern winter.

Some poor sod's undoubtedly dead

Covid 19? No, ithey'd have said.

He has always been subject to the recurring roar-of-something-not-quite-said

Which echoes, nevertheless, reverberates, disturbing the dead,

All around my desperately thinking head,

Hidden clouds drop hail-rain

Like sharp-soft stones pelting me down

into a world turning wet and lonely, for me.

I sit by the window wearing a clown’s frown

On a world turning out to be different than even I expected

A sharp decline in the chances, offered by the gods,

A rise in the night sky's slnking-frown,

A clown’s painted-on smile,

A curve of white grease, lips pointing down, 

A mile wide tease, an eight mile high light relief,

Definitely not heaven-sent, he said,

But splashed all over my northernsky,

The moon offers me limited respite

From interminable night:

Light suffuses 

To the tightness of my still-beating heart

Saturated, now, as the storm subsides,

Satiated with all the blood and thunder of no disguise

Infectiing lonesome, covid 19 English eyes

I lack that mandatory air of  fooling-about

Which hides what is really always there

A man trapped in this thinnest of air.