some illnesses announce themselves,
brandishing their weapons and consequences
blindly, blithely, letting your body
betray you: vomit on the tiles,
blood bursting behind pressurized flesh.
by their signs you can know them,
a flu, a fever,
an effluence of bile, an estuary of sweat.
some illnesses announce themselves,
self-identifying, self-assured,
full of pride and hubris and vitality:
hello,
here i am,
a disease, a disorder,
malady and misery come to camp out awhile.
but the sly disease,
the slick illness that knows that
awareness will oust it from these cozy surroundings,
those furtive cancers
will linger lazily along the lengths of your limbs,
creep quietly into the chasm of your chest,
remaining mostly motionless
so that the beat of your own heart will spread the poison.
it can take years to notice;
and after all that time,
the illness is so entrenched, it can feel impossible to oust.
this is why we ignore our illnesses.
content to let it lie, because that's easier, because that's simpler,
because in the groups we surround ourselves with
it is easier to call it state pride than racism,
to call it traditional values instead of sexism,
conservatism, not homophobia,
fiscal responsibility instead of fuck all them poor people
that never are gonna do anything for society anyway.
for these diseases, the cost of a cure
is steeper even than the cost of a welfare program;
to strip those disorders
out of the heart, to mine them out of the blood
and the organs and the pulse,
to raze them out of your mind,
it takes fire, and burning, and pain, and a long long time.
this is no walk-for-a-cure kind of feel-good get-well mission.
this is rage, and hatred, and grief,
and a sadness so deep it will burn.
and maybe you never get to the other side,
maybe you are never quite clean of that illness, of the grit of it.
maybe you become a shell, almost exoskeletal
in your gauntness, fragile
in the breakable foundations you are trying to establish.
but you fight for that cure,
you fight till your hair falls out,
till your blood is poison or sludge or chemical,
till your skin is yellow and your eyes are grey
and none of the processes of your body
function the way that they used to.
change like that, it hurts you.
but the illness, and all of its consequences, hurt everyone.