Vaccine 

After the vaccination I lay on the sofa

tracing the path of your injected germ 

planted like an insidious thought inside me.

I was Alicia Hubberman from Notorious 

languishing in a dark room waiting to die.

“They’re poisoning me,” I said to myself.

I know its foolish, but shots are triggering.

I had managed to avoid getting a flu shot

my entire adult life. Now I feel bitten, not

unlike the act of being raped in bright light,

fluorescents, in fact, and in front of others.

Couldn’t they see I was just a boy?

Snake bite, hornet sting, serrated dagger.

My castle has been penetrated and now

the enemy is within my walls plotting

my demise from behind every capillary.

So this is how I am to be gotten rid of. 

I was the boy that pleaded for a pill 

the size of a bullet, rather than be punctured.

I would swallow poison not to be stabbed

with so narrow a needle that my cells cry

out screaming in sheer expectation of it’s sting.

My blood stream flows everything toward my heart.

Even now I feel a sentence racing through my veins,

its cryptic message a fate my body must translate.

A sidewinder flicking its black tongue beneath my skin.

Now inside, I can’t fight you without fighting myself.

I have let the enemy in and have been

trespassed by a mercenary bullet-shaped worm

as if I ‘d been forced to eat a maggot

who’s mission is to multiply, swallowing me alive. 

I feel my skeleton ache like a despairing heart.

Why should this chaste duel have no love at stake?

There is no expelling you now,

no way to suck you out of my system. 

I am bit and slowly tainted by your genetics.

They tell me I will live past this attempted murder,

That something in me will find the will to rally.

With your offspring inside me programmed to kill,

my very own D-day may finally be at hand.

You who are the bite of a recluse spider 

whose sperm is aimed at my heart’s mandala,

how will I live with you as my captor?

No longer entirely myself, and at the mercy

of an unseen invader, we assemble our arsenals.

It’s not enough to know who will kill who.

Inside my heart my army gathers.

February 8th, 2021