What will the ground be made of today, cement, earth or quicksand?

The days are delirious and no longer have a name. Bad habits like staying in and rejecting invitations have become prescribed and useful. There’s a water drought. Was I ever fluid?

At work in the garden is a cowboy gardener. Old triggers shoot down new blooms and bring last year's cares. Collecting blossoms of optimism, trying to not wear rough gloves otherwise they just crumble away. Intense gentleness is on the do-or-die list.

In my bedroom, I’m a solitary teenager again. Manifesting destinies and other worlds through the limitless promise of the internet. On a call to the jobcentre the creak of a mattress says even the government is working from bed. A cinnamon flavoured incense stick masks another bad habit.

Nothing is more enchanting than the neglected flowers that have built communities on polluted main roads. Every day I visit them.

There’s strange debris on the street. All around are used surgical masks and chalk rainbows.

The air blows kisses that smell like petrol and kerosene.

Pinned to every front door is a love letter fuelled by civil disobedience. The sun pours gold on colonial ghosts who are desperately trying to regurgitate their education.

From over the garden fence comes parts of a sermon or a TedTalk or maybe it’s the neighbours talking to each other about how the heart is as limitless as Google maps and exceeds far beyond the parameters of that digital compass.

How to retreat into the paralysis that has seeped beyond sleep is a luxury not afforded those who still catch the bus to work at 5am, aged in the decades-old marinade of a hostile environment.

How now that the dust has cleared and in broad daylight stands the pyramid of white supremacy, it’s up to us to retrieve the bricks that uphold this cultural disease.

My skin is made of latex and ethanol but when I watch the news I’m still as porous as the entrance to Animal Crossing. A reporter asks now that we’ve tasted the earth, are we willing to digest its dirt, remove it from underneath our fingernails, and wait for it to metamorphose into a tool for change?

Dysmorphic land. What will the ground be made of today, cement, earth or quicksand?