A Florida poet reads about Ukraine’s blackouts and Washington’s diesel diplomacy, and talks to a client who still remembers the week the lights went out
Monday, 26 October 2026. Largo, Florida. Filling up the Honda at a Circle K, watching the numbers spin like a slot machine that always wins, 9.15am.
Gas Prices And Geography
Every Monday before Route Five I fill the car up, and every Monday the price is slightly different, and every Monday the man at the next pump says something about the government. Today he said they should drill more. Last week he said they should drill less. I do not think the man has a fixed position. I think the man just likes to talk to strangers at pumps, which in Florida is the closest thing we have to a village square.
While the tank filled I read the report on how Trump tried to stop Ukraine bombing Russian oil refineries by restricting its drones. The jokes are very sharp: drones that must obey an American speed limit, a war with terms and conditions, a ceasefire only one side seems to know about. But underneath them is a single number that stopped me. Around six hundred thousand Ukrainians lost electricity after Russian strikes on one October day.
I know what losing electricity looks like here. It looks like a week after a hurricane, with everybody’s freezer food rotting, old people sleeping in their cars for the air conditioning, and the whole street sharing one neighbour’s generator. That is a storm. Theirs is a war. The difference between those two things is the whole piece.
Mrs Okonkwo And The Week Of Candles
My second stop on Route Five is Mrs Grace Okonkwo, seventy-nine, a retired nurse originally from Lagos, who moved to Largo via London, where she worked at Guy’s Hospital for twenty-six years. She remembers Hurricane Ian. She spent nine days without power in 2022, sharing ice from the gas station with her neighbours and keeping her insulin in a cooler.
When I told her about Ukraine’s power cuts, she sat very still and said that the hardest thing about a blackout is not the dark. It is the cold food, the medicine that needs a fridge, and the old people upstairs who cannot manage the stairs. She said, they are going into winter. Then she said nothing for a while, and I did not try to fill the silence.
Diesel Diplomacy, As Seen From A Honda
The report makes one argument I keep returning to: that a cheaper tank of diesel is not a peace treaty. Standing at a Circle K, I found it very easy to see why people care about fuel prices. My Meals on Wheels mileage reimbursement is forty-one cents a mile, which covers roughly the cost of the fuel and none of the cost of my soul. If gas goes up by a dollar, I notice. Every client of mine on a fixed income notices.
But the piece makes the point that these priorities take a lot of explaining when one side is losing power stations in October and the other side’s refineries are being protected as if they were a hospital. A refinery offline makes the markets nervous. An apartment block without heating gets a statement of concern. The joke works because the arithmetic does not.
A Poem Written At The Pump
I wrote this while the tank finished filling, on the back of a receipt, which is the only paper a Circle K provides with any enthusiasm.
Somebody far off adjusts a speed, / somebody nearer counts the cost, / a drone slows down above a field, / a city’s heating lights are lost. / Here at the pump the numbers spin, / a man says drill, a man says don’t. / The price of diesel is a sum. / The price of winter is what they won’t.
I read it to Mrs Okonkwo. She said the last line did not scan. I said I know. She said leave it, it is truer that way. She was a nurse for forty years. She knows when to leave a wound alone.
What A Florida Retiree Knows About War
Mrs Okonkwo grew up in Lagos during the Biafran war. She does not talk about it much. Today she said only that wars are always described by men in offices, and lived by women in kitchens trying to keep the food cold. I asked if I could put that in my diary. She said yes, but to spell her name right. I have checked it four times.
The report ends with a line about peace in our time, subject to network availability. Mrs Okonkwo did not laugh at that. She said it was not a joke, it was a description. Then she laughed anyway, because she has lived through worse, and because the only thing you can do with a description like that is laugh at it so it does not win.
The Diary And The Road
For anyone who found this diary looking for something lighter, the satire.vip home page has plenty of entries about pelicans, golf carts and a parrot that only says Tuesday. Most weeks I write about Florida being ridiculous. This week Florida was quiet, and the world was loud, and a seventy-nine-year-old nurse in Largo told me the truest thing I heard all month.
Route Five finished at one. I drove home past the Gulf with the windows down. The power was on. The fridge was humming. I stood in my kitchen for a moment and just listened to it, the way you listen to a heartbeat. Then I made a sandwich, and wrote this, and saved it, and thought of the people going into winter without that sound.