Most writing about disease imagines an invader storming the gates. Ernesto Priego does something stranger and sadder: he lets the plague speak through everything friendly we do. His central claim arrives in the opening sentence: the sickness "thrives. indeed, on being human / our touching each other". It is not a stranger to our way of life but a creature fed by it. The poem names no particular outbreak, and it doesn't need to. What unsettles us is that the things it lists are not vices or carelessness but the small kindnesses that hold a community together.
The structure follows that idea. The opening sounds almost clinical, with its "thrives", "droplets & breath" and "proximity & closeness", the vocabulary of a health leaflet. Then the poem slides into ordinary life. "shaking hands, kissing once or twice" gives way to "the cup of tea, the walk together", and finally to a run of overheard speech: "y'alright mate, / saying cheers, give me five, / would you like a top-up, / anytime, here for you." Judging by words like "mate" and "top-up", the voice is distinctly British and colloquial. By the end of the list the clinical and the tender have fused. "anytime, here for you" is the warmest phrase in the poem and, in this context, the most dangerous. Priego never points this out. He lets the placement do the work.
The imagery is quietly physical. "hold on to the handrail / move down the carriage, / use all available space" reads like the imperatives of a transport announcement, yet here they describe how infection travels. The handrail is a perfect small image of shared touch, everyone's hands on one surface. Even better is "hands on face / speak out loud", where gesture and speech blur: a hand on a face can "speak", and speaking itself sends out "droplets & breath". The body becomes both a language and a hazard.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The lines are short and uneven, breaking where a breath might, so the poem feels spoken rather than composed. Punctuation is deliberately unsettled. The full stop in the middle of line two, followed by a lowercase "indeed", makes the speaker seem to catch himself mid-thought, realising something as he says it. Elsewhere the lines run on with commas and no end stops, so the list tumbles forward the way these habits flow into one another. Only two lines begin with a capital: "We should have known it well" and "And they thought we could raise fences". That frames the poem between two pronouns, a "we" who understand too late and a "they" who believed in barriers.
The bracketed "(don't stand so/don't stand so close to me)" seems to echo the pop song "Don't Stand So Close to Me" by The Police. The echo works in several ways. It sounds like a half-joke, a lyric stuck in the head. The broken, repeated phrase also stammers, enacting the awkwardness of learning to keep our distance. And a song about forbidden closeness turns into literal advice. Placing it in parentheses makes it a nervous aside, something muttered rather than declared.
The ending is the poem's sharpest turn. "And they thought we could raise fences" begins with "And", as if an old argument is still going. The past tense "thought" tells us the fences failed. The line sets barriers against everything that came before it, the handrails, embraces and offered cups of tea. Whether the fences are walls, borders or simply distance between people, the poem suggests they misunderstand what is being fought. The last line has no full stop, so the poem stops rather than concludes.
That refusal to wrap things up is part of its significance. Priego avoids both panic and blame. "We should have known" shares the responsibility, yet the tone is rueful rather than accusing. The poem turns a public emergency into a lament for the ordinary, and it exposes a painful irony: the traits that make us most sociable are exactly what make us vulnerable. A poem that begins in the language of a leaflet ends by making us miss a handshake.