If only Shakespeare had had the word fuck
As we have the word fuck – a thorough word.
Not even the French have a word so perfect.
It does multiple duty – not unlike
A player-tinkerer : here a joiner,
Here ass-headed, here fondling a queen,
Mock-serious here, here hushed and self-righteous,
Here high drama, a stroke of low comedy here.

How much more of a piece, for example,
For Doll Tearsheet to have just said, "Fuck off"
To Jack Falstaff rather than "Hang yourself"
Or "A pox damn you, you muddy rascal"
Or some such stuff, I used to think
Until I came to learn something of the pox.

Variora major. Not minor –
It was minor which visited the queen
And disfigured her lady-in-waiting,
Leicester’s pretty sister, Mary, of whom
Her husband, Philip Sidney’s uncle, wrote,
"When I had left my wife at court to go
To Newhaven she was a fair lady;
in my eyes the fairest. On my return
I found my wife as foul as the smallpox
Could make her. Now she lives solitary."

Like invisible bullets fired by a cough,
Viral missiles projectile through the air,
Each a hundred different proteins
Beautifully woven together :
In form more sublime than cathedrals.

Tail spirals like a siege engine
Into a good cell’s outside wall,
A thread of disaster coiled within –
An encrypted message which, once released,
Tells the agent to quickly set up shop
And spread itself with all the vigor
With which the zealot circulates pamphlets.
An eruption of pustules splits the skin,
Then the bleeding begins, the whites of the eye
Turn all black, as if ready to leak blood.
Still the patient has not loss consciousness
As catastrophic hemorrhaging ensues.
In short, a bloody mess – sometimes thought to be
A bad reaction to penicillin.

And the smell. A peculiar smell.
One of the dread mysteries of smallpox –
So ghastly that a doctor who had spent
Many year working in the torrid zone
Studying disease, having seen poor flesh
Gush blood at every orifice,
Shed its intestines and disintegrate,
Said he knew nothing so awful.
And doubted he could go through it again.

But before a symptom is ever manifest
Victims are said to have terrible dreams.
Mercutio knew something of bad dreams,
And in his valediction, where I used to think,
"A Plague? Plague! Tell that star-crossed little skirt-chaser
To fuck himself – it was under his arm you fell!"
I think now, "No. No… a good plague works just as well."