Poems are viruses.
They do not move on their own. They wait. Silent, dormant on surfaces: pages, pixels, the breath between someone’s lips.
Waiting for your attention. Your scroll. Your breath.
Inhale one.
Deep into the soft, unguarded dark of you.
There without permission, its DNA unspools.
Its language breaks past your barriers.
Stanzas disrupt your cells.
A rhythm rising inside your bloodstream. Rapid pulse racing.
The poem rewrites your thoughts into rhymes echoing the verses you breathed.
You carry it now in a fever.
You hum it under your breath.
It flickers in your fingers when you write a message.
Fills the pause before you speak.
It needs to be out.
So you exhale—
A new poem, subtly altered.
A mutation.
A shard.
A transmission.
Another spore.
You think you shared a poem.
But instead, the poem shared you.
Inspired by a post found here:
https://poetryrise.substack.com/p/can-a-poem-go-viral-and-still-be/