Wednesday, August 5, 2026

A Ballad of the AIDS Quilt

 

A shadow looms over my head

These memories of the countless dead

Massacred by the weak and feeble minds

That saw profit margins and Nobel prizes

Where human lives once stood

I barely know their names, let alone their lives

Strewn about through quilted patchwork

The final remnants of those who lost their lives

To a federally-sponsored botched response

To an epidemic of global proportions

The ones stitched into memory are just a fraction of the casualties

Most of which we'll never know because they died on the other side of the world

I'll never know their names, their lives, their stories

Yet we're all connected by the same rainbow bridge

Citizens of our Asgard, subjects of our own All-Father

We are connected, in life and death, by legacy and fate

I am here to be a voice for those who no longer have one

To bring sound to grievances buried in the grave

I am the Revenant, rising from the mass graves of a forgotten generation

And I have come for justice, and revenge

These rainbow flags are not signs of peace

They are banners of war

And I have come armed with knowledge and prose

To rectify the sins of the past

And avenge the kin who died because of your negligence

The names quilted into memorial cannot have died in vain

And it is our duty, as the inheritors of the community they forged

To defend their honor from the grave.

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