At the end of the world

When most people bought up toilet paper, bottled water, canned goods at the end of the world
My mother bought up floss
She bought packs upon packs, filing our bathroom cabinet and the bed beside her drawer
"When I die," She told me, her voice colored with a relief of humor,
"I want my corpse to look nice when it smiles."

In contrast, I found myself drawn to acrylic paints
I couldn't afford it, I had lost my job two weeks before
And should have been saving my money for the toilet paper, bottled water, and canned goods that were simultaneously impossible to find and impossible to afford
Or the inevitable medical attention designed to bankrupt me and all my loved ones
Instead I bought paints
Bright yellow hues, the autumnal oranges and reds of foliage,
The deep sea blues and purples, a white snow and a charcoal black
And a green like grass in the springtime (the end of the world started in the spring time).

Maybe I thought like Monet, I could eat my colors
Imagining them sugary sweet and dripping succulence by virtue of their brightness
 Maybe I felt the urge to create at the end of days
Leave a legacy of beauty like my mother's perfect, white-toothed corpse

Perhaps I was looking to make something different, to color reality less bleak
To repaint the contagion map spring green instead of the alarming red, a warning of the disease at its peak
I would rebrand the quarintine signs with pinks and yellows of springtime flowers, paint smiles back onto the faces of worried new anchors,
To paint "open" over the "closed" stores, to paint the people back onto the streets and into the stopped trains.
I paint the sky blue and the sea purple and the grass green and the whole world alive, alive once more.

Perhaps, in a world of pain and death, I just wanted to make a little more color, a little more joyful before the end.

--written in response to the covid 19 outbreak of 2020