I
I watched you
from a distance,
from a safe distance;
I watched you wither away
into your twilight of despair,
into a darkness darker than the darkest night—
Night descended and a blanket of woes
blacker than my funeral clothes,
like a blight, covered and smothered
your young life.
II
Your life became a desert island,
a deserted island of shame,
desolation and pain,
and confusion.
I watched you in your desperation,
shipwrecked, nerves wrecked,
stretched upon the rack
of self-torturing thoughts and doubts,
full of turmoil and trauma—
your boli cracked, your boli broken,
your life scrambled—
a cracked and scrambled egg,
sad omelette fried
in fears and tears.
Ah life, life is a fragile eggshell…
I watched you, reduced
to a mere shell of your former self,
fighting to keep afloat,
to keep the fragments of your disappointment
from falling apart;
so disconsolate, isolated, ostracised,
by your friends and relatives,
abandoned by all.
III
That day your world fell in,
fell apart and hope imploded
upon itself when you learnt
the dreaded HIV,
harbinger of certain death,
was alive and well and dwelling
in the crucible of your body
fluids, in your blood.
IV
You knew—
your numbed brain
comprehended
that your days were numbered;
and you surrendered.
V
Your life ended
and you became a living dead,
sick
with worry and anxiety,
submerged to subterranean realm,
abysmal well of fear and dark despair,
depression and self-pity,
long before your system of immunity,
your city of Troy,
its walls of Trojan condom breached,
white corpuscles, trembling and bleached,
succumbed
to Trojan horse
of villainous viral invasion.
VI
To prolong your pain was not an option
for you could not afford their cocktail of hope
so your ailment progressed
to full-blown AIDS—
here was your Hades
and your only dope
was the thought of heaven.
And as you degenerated and quickly grew old,
the doctors diagnosed and you were told
the grim, the grave, prognosis…
it was just a matter of time.
VII
And I in my fear
and ignorance and suspicion,
my fear of social sanction,
like all the others, distanced myself
and did nothing
to ease the severity of your suffering.
I wondered how did you get it.
Who did you get it from?
Who did you give it to?
What if you give it to me?
What if you gave it to me?
What if you had given it to me?
And all I could do was pray for a cure,
for the future of the children,
for the children of the future.
And I resolved never to be a victim.
Copyright ©2001 by G. Newton V. Chance
- G. NEWTON V. CHANCE
- George Newton Vivian Chance (Trinidad and Tobago) -- member of the Poet Society of Trinidad and Tobago, http://poetssocietytt.blogspot.com/ and the World Poets Society, http://world-poets.blogspot.com/ -- born in Tobago on 3rd March 1957. While residing at Rio Claro was inspired to write over a hundred poems at the turn of the Millennium. Hobbies include playing wind instruments, building computers, observing nature, reading and writing poetry. Believes that the power of a song is in its ability to evoke emotions by the marriage of lyric and music but that music without lyric can be just as powerful, that lyric without music can also be just as powerful, that there is music in the lyric and that lyric can be simple yet profound. Also, in this the age of computers, would like to model his lines after simple and efficient code and, analogous to Object Oriented Programming, achieve most of his imagery from nouns and verbs, avoiding the bloat and excess of unnecessary adjectives. This is what he aspires to attain in his poetry.
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