this infection

(note: formatting messed up due to narrow colummns, so poem may not scan properly when read)

Lately, whenever I smoke, my fingers reek
of it, so on my way to the bus stop, I go to the
drugstore to pick up some hand sanitizer.

When I walk in the door. I see a
dispenser standing right in front of the checkout,
and I am reminded of my first day of university, and how there were
hand sanitizer dispensers every five feet that you walked.

That was the year of the swine flu pandemic. That was the
year there were hand sanitizer stations everywhere you went.
In the schools, in the malls, on the shops, on the streets.
Everywhere you werent there were people rubbing disinfectant
on their hands.

I loved it.
Finally, an excuse for my excessive hand-washing, and I could
stop paying for hand sanitizer since it was everywhere I went.
You would think that with my background, a pandemic would just
make it worse, but I thrilled at being alive in a time where
world-wide everyone was getting sicl. I pretended I was in the
fourteenth century and that it was the plague.

I didn't even care if i caughth it. The H1N1 outbreak
was even better than SARS. I felt calm in the eye of everyone's
panic. In class, I drew comics of pigs for the entertainment of my
desk-mate. It was hard not to laugh at the captions I wrote. My poor
pigs were outraged at the slandering of their good name.

I only knew one person who caught it. My best friend's daughter
was seven at the time. Public schools are as bad as public
pools and the kids are worse than pigeons,
passing pinkeye and head lice back and forth.
It's a wonder that any of them get well.

It passed though.
when I came back from Christmas vacation, I noticed that the
dispensers were gone. Only a few remained, by the door,
in the library. I guess that the scare had died down.

It was for the best, I suppose, but I still miss the
way that panic would spread through the room if anyone
dared to cough.