What was once a cast iron has been left to rust.
No signs of immunity, just airways caked in crust.

Cut down in the prime of his life, a cut by no means clean.
No other future but to know what the virus would eventually come to mean.

Twisted up inside, eyes shut tight against the light.
Stomach wrings itself, like a cloth mopping up a life.
Rancid, rank discharge, suppurating lymph nodes grown to bursting.
Every breath a chore.

Capillaries collapse, blackening the skin.
This man has breathed his last, his very prayers iconoclast.
His kin around his bed, now they're infected too.
Can you fathom being one of them, your whole bloodline disintegrating in front of you.

The bodies of those bed ridden, curdling beneath the sheets.
While those who remain living, wander retching and frenzied into the streets.
Daughter heads to the river, in a fever dream.
Falls headlong into the water, to rot away beneath the reeds.

This river runs through a city. Foul, diseased.
By virtue of her callous passing, the bacillus will be released.

Virus runs through house and home, summoning pus and pain.
Thousands gone while millions come to meet this end again and again.

Rolling, weeping, wild bovine eyes seeing what's not there.
The pathogen came so sudden and no one was prepared.

O father who art in heaven, shallow is thy claim.
If this be your will done, then you and the plague are one and the same.

Swollen, bloated.
Organs stretching.
Innards brewing.
Guts are bursting.
Intumescent.
Stomach opens.
Contents pour out.
Stomach acid dribbles down and burns away what skin is left on rotting legs and crumbling broken bones.

Curling fingers of death embracing a continent.
Coldly probing and searching, eyeless and blind.
Determined and eager to find new lives to suck dry.
And leave their bodies to shrivel and fester in the sun.
Or lie bloated in the water, as distended monuments to a dying race.
Soon no remnants will be left, some other species will move to take its place.