Why do I feel for them?
Is it because
they remind me
of me—
these bacteria?
They move slowly.
They hide out.
Build small.
Stay unnoticed.
They’ve been with me
longer than I’ve known.
And they don’t have an intent
to ****.
They just wanted a home.
That I might die
was never their goal.
It’s just a fallout.
But me?
I have intent to ****.
Every day I wake up
and take pills
like they were warheads.
The pill has no motive to **** either.
No ammo does.
It is always the man behind.
The pill—
It is just a chemical configuration
that doesn’t know why it dissolves.
I take note of the dynamic.
The one without intent dies.
The one with, decides.
I pop the pill.
Then it's the germ versus the pill.
Germ survives, I die.
Pill survives, I live.
Wonder where else I have seen this.
Nations— vetoed into silence?
Children— bullied into submission?
Friends— who were docile, forgotten?
Me— or someone like me—
who took a call.
It is strange to feel
unspoken companionship
with microbes that ****?
Will it feel strange
when they’re gone?
I think about that.
Like how people trying to quit
miss their cigarettes.
Not just the nicotine—
the mateyness with the stick—
Here just now. Then gone.
Will I feel that?
A weird kind of postpartum?
Not grief, exactly.
But absence.
Silence where something lived.
Once.
I think illness does this to people.
Brings delirious thoughts, that is.
Imagine befriending or mourning bacteria
or weighing up their intent
in your right minds. Eh.
Why did they choose me though?
Because, I too am quiet, like them?
It angers me to think.
Then I feel a tired, grudging respect for them,
as if finally learning self-respect.
They, the bacilli, have no malice.
They don’t even know I exist.
They don’t feel guilt.
Or regret.
They just are.
But I have to end them.
Each day.
Like heartbreak.
I wonder if they could speak,
what would they say?
Maybe nothing.
Maybe like monks in the hills,
they’d bow and whisper,
“We only came to live.”
And I would say back,
quietly,
almost ashamed,
“So did I.”
I wrote this in recognition of the sometimes inevitable necessity to eliminate one life form so that another can go on. The illness in question isn't named because the dilemma isn’t about diagnosis. It’s about intent. About the strange position of having to end something that never meant harm. Of being the only one at the table with a mind, and a choice, and the unbearable clarity of consequence.
The poem tries to sit with this discomfort: that sometimes, survival means killing without hate. That the enemy may not even know you exist. That war can be fought not with weapons, but with a glass of water and a pill. And that even in such silence, there can be a murmur. A bit like grief.
