Chikungunya

(1)

Motherfucker with a hypodermic needle,

Buzzing on the other line: “You mind?
I got a sixty-micron dick to click the skin
And I come in unprotected. No net for us.

Suckin’ you off ‘til you unclot yourself.
Cough up my donut tapioca, drizzled in syrup.

When my sweet analgesia turns sour-stopped,

I’ll leave you the most intimate itch:

I stuck you a needle, I slipped you a thread,
But I loved you like blood in the bows of your breath.”

(2)

Bloodsucker loved me dry. A popular opinion

When you consider how much I craved him.

Which is unbearable: A world without winter?

Or living left lonely by the fireplace? Fine.

I chose the fever of her fiddle, our coupling

As bumbled as a Rimsky-Korsakov number.

We traded pressure for pregnant pauses,
And I incubate his dengue, like Ben-Gay to

My precious joints. My precious loins. My,

What possesses you to spit on tropic weather?

(3)

Other lovers blame it on climate change.
Too hot to sustain relationships of yesterday

So we keep standing in water, stagnant. Wait.

Wait for the smell of thunder in December.

No snow will stick us together; only sweet tea

And vodka and vapors and larva ascending

Like Lazarus from l’amour, never ending.

He will leave. And he’ll etch in pock marks,

Strung around your neck:

How you wish he stayed.

How you wish he held you

in the shivering cold.