"HIV" - a poem for National HIV Test Week

HIV

wedged into the bloat of Mankind, it lurks

coiled in the caverns of our insides

and it snares without hooks or nets or clamps

until all of our blood is occupied

and bellowing out, breaths become a blink

ground down by the weight of a dying heart’s pulse

and snaked into the body’s tributaries

the dried blood-tide ropes its territory

its naming has never contained it

no sound has delayed it, and yet we deny it

judging its victims, sinner, demon, beast

until it snatches one of us; too late we know

it has the seared conscience of a desert rock

and born deaf and dumb and bound to nothing

it forever strafes its code in spaces

whose first and final tourist is silence

and despite all the lines of ink we scribe,

it imprints itself and imprints itself and imprints itself

on every nation’s flag; yet it begs no translation,

because death has swallowed all our tongues.

ZHZ

#HIVTestWeek