All I Know of Infectious Disease I've Learned From Watching Doc Holliday Die

With more pinned on him
than Judas
aside from tuberculosis
the dentist-turned-gambler
and part-time pistolero

saved or avenged
a few of his friends
through a different sort
of social distancing
with foemen.

When asked if conscience
weighed on his head
he admitted to coughing it up
with his lungs.

No stranger to new normals
he rode again
never noosed by backwoods bedfellows

nixed instead by the consumption
contracted from his mother
in a Georgian childhood
that's mostly disremembered.

Denied a lost shot of whiskey
"This is funny,"
he told a nurse
about dying in bare feet
without holes from bullets.

Heroes don't declare themselves
like politicos in press briefings.
History, Hollywood
and subtle parentheticals
establish whom to hail

but who doesn't like
some afternoon violence?
Who needs a break
from sanitized life?


Currently reading:
"Fighting Handguns" by Jeff Cooper.