The COVID Diaries: What I AM Afraid Of (a poem)

When I was in college,
Andrew and I,
were voted most popular
to survive
on a small desert island with.
I lost Andrew
along the way.
He didn't survive.
It wasn't survivable.
But I wasn't there too.
By chance,
I survived.
Most likely to,
apparently.
What luck.
He once suggested
I read
The Road,
a story about surviving
the apocalypse.
Only it isn't the main character who lives.
He burns everything,
down to his dinted shopping-carts wheels,
to make sure,
his son survives.
You don't read about
the son shoveling
ash like snow
though...
you just know,
he's left,
to live.

That's what I'm afraid of.

Beneath the snowflake, soccer-mom, exterior,
Beneath the near-bottomless pit
of compassion,
I well know,
is a little steel will,
ironclad,
invincible,
it rises.
There is no low
that it is ashamed
to crawl back from.
There is no survivors' guilt
it will not tilt.
It will do anything,
and I mean anything
to survive.
I will cry,
but still
skin the buck.
I will zip
the body bag
of my friend
and begin
again.

That's what I'm afraid of.

This will
Rip into the eyes of an over-sized attacker
without thought.
This will
Spoon a stranger at minus sixty Fahrenheit
in the Bitterroot's worst snow
just to take another hundred thousands steps
with frozen tear ducts.
I know
because
I have
before
and
one more.

That's what I'm afraid of.

This monster,
that sighs,
and cries,
but survives,
and survives.
Brighter than Plath fresh
from the oven,
Lighter than Lazarus,
trading feathers
with Icarus
at a Phoenix revival.
Irrepressible,
even as what is loved most
burns to a ghost,
and spreads
away the next
universe.
I will
stay.

That is what I'm afraid of.

Like cockroaches,
Twinkies,
or Keith Richards,
I should have been dead already,
expired,
past prime.
I'm afraid
I will not break.
I'm afraid
I will survive
to shovel
ashes.
I'm afraid
that
is the answer
to everything.
I am most likely
to survive
and
that
is what
I'm afraid of.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the answer, but what is the right question? What should we be afraid?