Ode to Facemasks
If I could, I would put on a facemask and walk into the desert to meet with fairies and angels.
I put on a facemask to resist sandstorms, put on a facemask to resist smog, put on a facemask to make it through days of the avian flu and days of SARS and days of the novel coronavirus. The old boat has passed ten thousand mountains, but there are another ten thousand mountains before me!
I’ve worn a facemask to be fashionable, worn a facemask for my identity, worn a facemask to avoid the mass surveillance system, and worn a facemask to shout and to talk to myself. My tenure wearing facemasks is just as glorious as the tenure of those in antiquity who didn’t have facemasks!
But I haven’t gone so crazy I’d rob a bank. Facemasks have a certain insanity and brute force, though, so bankers should fight back with their own facemasks and their bright eyes will triumph over the blurry, bewildered, brutal eyes of the robbers.
Others of the new era, those internet trolls, are probably wearing facemasks too. To post anonymously is to post while masked. If they put on sunglasses along with their facemasks, they’ll be footmen to hackers, waiting to be crowned with blocked accounts.
But after all, from doctors and nurses, people wearing facemasks are just scared citizens, facemasks protecting their trembling. The gangsters you see in movies never wear facemasks. They save the cops a lot of trouble with their old-school good looks.
Scared citizens put facemasks on their dogs, put facemasks on their cats, even dream of putting facemasks on pangolins and mice. I have to say, this is the reality surrealist poetry is rooted in!
The node of surrealist poetry’s victory is: wear a facemask to eat, wear a facemask to smoke or drink, wear a facemask to make love, wear a facemask to spit, wear a facemask to die. The surrealists come back to haunt us again and again.
Mom dug through the cupboard in search of facemasks for me to wear. Since she keeps a tidy house and hates to waste anything, she had unintentionally kept a stash of facemasks for seventeen years, ever since the SARS crisis.
I said to her, Now that facemasks are out of stock, I can't believe I didn't open a facemask factory back when I had the chance—I'd be rich! I spent a whole week lamenting my lack of understanding of society, economics, and history.
But after a week I figured my understanding of fate had deepened, so as soon as the drugstores were selling facemasks again I started stockpiling them, unethically looking forward to the next facemask season.
There have been Chinese people getting beaten up on Sydney streets for wearing facemasks, or ordered to remove their facemasks by the police in Berlin. How can the naked mouths of Sydney and Berlin understand? This is our way of life and means of existence!
If I could, I would put on a facemask and walk bare-assed into the desert to meet with fairies and angels.
People don't recognize me in a facemask, and because I wear a facemask I don't recognize myself. In my own mind, I confirm who I am over and over, but my facemask always denies me. And yet, when I take off my facemask, it turns out to be nothing.