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Trypanasoma Cruzi

Those words are my tolling bells of death.
Never did I think I'd hear death's voice
in such rhythmically seductive words:
Trypanasoma Cruzi.
Death is my last great romance, and
the doctor cannot understand.

He reads disease as ink on paper
colored black and white,
but mine is shaded red, and red again.

He speaks in ugly sounds: Chagas Disease
is a weakening of the heart caused
by a bacteria [my death bells] carried
by Triatomid Beetles [kissing bugs].

He claims I caught my death
in India, asleep, ignorant of
the tickle of its legs on my skin,
the pinch of its kiss at the corner of my mouth,
its feces left upon my cheek,
the bacteria I welcomed by scratching.

My dilapidated heart cannot house
life much longer,
I will be operated on today
With the sound in my ear
of death singing
Trypanasoma Cruzi.

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