The Malady Of Exclusion Poem by Widad Wivelle

On the tertian dawn, my corpus fell into languor,
smote by a morbid enchantment distilled
from the venom of conceal'd betrayals.
The air itself became miasmatic,
a pestilential incense coiling
from the cenotaph of my heart.
My veins, once argent rivers,
congealed into sluggish ichor;
my temples throbbed with cacodaemoniacal pulsions,
as if a conclave of unseen fiends
were drumming psalters within my skull.
Exclusion became a contagion—
an insidious pestis spirans,
gnawing at marrow and sinew alike.
Their camaraderie, that clandestine colloquy,
was transmuted into a plague-wind
sweeping through the catacombs of my breath.
And he—
the bearer of mercurial kindness,
whose syllables once served as apothegmatic balms—
knew, yet spake not,
that I languished in this fevered oubliette.
His silence, more noxious than pestilence,
rendered my flesh febrile,
my spirit cadaveric,
my presence a spectral effigy in the aula.
Thus the third day was not lived but endured:
a litany of coughs and vertiginous swoons,
an alchemic debilitation brewed by secrecy,
till even my shadow seemed consumptive,
and my breath resembled a dying thurible.