world poetry day and HIV

In celebration of World Poetry Day, here's a blackout poetry on HIV. It's my first time to do this. I found it quite hard because there is just so little to work with. Unlike freestyle poetry where I would just sit to contemplate for the right word, blackout poetry already serves the word making the serving limited; and in that limitation, I had to make sense.

I used the book of Greg Louganis, the famous HIV-positive American Olympic diver, titled Breaking the Surface.

LIVING WITH HIV

I had accepted that I was afraid

when I really didn't want

HIV, a dumb secret 

I was sure to be a scandal.

Yet HIV was no way to be.

It turned out I had it together

all on my own, one cold morning.

I wanted to scream at my life,

to be thankful and to stop moaning about

the weather.

Postscript: All rights of the book goes to Mr. Louganis and his publisher.