Influenza

Dances in snuffly sleep-breath,
spritely in grey robes, jostling air.
She paints you geisha-white and
punts your bloodstream, a Boadicea
battling yawning phagocytes.

Influenza has a pretty name
and gatecrashes your Ishihara*
gathering of cells like a hacker
with her errhine virus, tiptoes in.
She works like a mimer; silent,

tickling and giggling in alveolar
trees. She is a succubus, a
stain on paper map of you,
a tracheal woodpecker.
You try to choke her out.

Influenza tucks you into bed
and orders cocoa on room service.
She is a Guy Fawkes of the lung;
a dancing bee that withers on the warpath,
and leaves flowers by her lively grave.

* The Ishihara Test for colour blindness uses pointillism to conceal a
number (which the patient has to try to read) within a circle.