Slag Review
January 2019 |
For the dear one who said I put AIDS in their ear
for one panicked moment, I believed you, believed within a pillar of fear, doubt, loathing the cries for yet another Devil’s Island my lips traced your salt found each source & shiver oh, beautiful one, I understand fear, do you understand the luxury of loneliness? You, destined for other arms in other rooms silently my tongue sang your beauty tasting even the lines of your hands “The priest shall pronounce them unclean. All the days shall they be unclean, & they shall dwell alone outside the encampment. & they in whom the plague is, their clothes shall be rent, head bare, face veiled, & shall cry out to all who approach, Unclean! Unclean!” how easy it is in this life of fiction to fit someone with an iron mask in yet another Tinseltown remake Where Levitici meet Dumas, Hollywood circa ‘36, meet Playbill Broadway gay-boys at Bent, meet Angels in America, meet Rent, meet KS, pneumo- cystis, CMV, AZT, meet ACT-UP, die-in’s, Silence = Death, meet the CDC, T-Cells, CD4’s, meet seroconversion, sero-segregation, serial comorbidities, adverse events & drug resistance, meet PEP & PrEP, not-you, meet poz-pigs, bug chasers, meet clean & UB2, meet loss & loss & loss, everyone now pieces & parts, meet on-line, on-demand, virtual animations, more tokens please, meet burning effigies spun from AIDS quilts, meet apathy, meet compassion fatigue, meet AIDS is over, meet no one, not you, no one, U=U, none, meet mouthes paralyzed in endless threnodies But… are you clean? Are you? Clean? prisoners of our blood, guardians of our body fluids Unclean, we cry, Unclean |