This piece is a mishmash; specifically yet another that was constructed from mostly-unused fragments, perhaps in some poetic equivalent of throwing everything in sight at the wall, and seeing just how much of it sticks.

Part of the reason for this methodology comes from the still-ongoing Plague-April of 2020 situations of lockdowns and Covid-19 quarantine, and how its sometimes harder and harder to maintain a positive frame of mind.

Indeed, you often find yourself thinking of various doomsday/dystopian future scenarios, and how every single negative characteristic of our base natures, and every single mistake and skeleton of our past, from every level and plane, all the way from the petty/personal to the truly Meta/Cosmic, are all the chickens coming home to roost…

It’s also inspired by two particular eighties songs, the first of these being When Love Breaks Down by Prefab Sprout, and the second being a song The Police did on their 1980 album “Zenyatta Mondatta”, which had the long title: When the World is Running Down (You Make The Best of What’s Still Around)

The phrase “Painted Corpse” itself comes from a slang term used by system engineers, web designers, and several other groups of professionals to denote a system or process that is made to look spectacular, but not necessarily, to actually function. Hence, such a thing is a “Painted Corpse”, because it: “Looks beautiful on the surface, but is utterly lifeless underneath.”

When you get stir-crazy and paranoid enough to start to entertain those: “zOMG, we’re all gonna die!” thoughts, there is the ‘why even bother?’ fatalism that sets in that thoroughly convinces you that any worthwhile effort is the proverbial rearranging the deck-chairs on The Titanic.

That, of course, brings to mind the late, lamented Leonard Cohen’s song Everybody Knows off of his 1988 album: “I’m Your Man.”

Everybody knows that the plague is coming…
Everybody knows that it’s moving fast.
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
is just a shining artifact of the past…

There are a few other, much more minor references and influences in the piece, which I think most readers will be able to pick up, and which likely don’t need to be discussed beyond the context in which they are presented.