A Sonnet Written By A Person Dying Of Cholera In 19th Century London

There’s an invisible nuisance making the rounds,
You can hear it the awful retching sounds,
Smell it on the lips made a blue grey quake,
Feel it in the dry, rough wheeze it makes,
Hate it in the death count, long since lost,
Paid for with a much too great a cost,
Moving through the air a pollutant prowl,
Death hangs on a breath, in this place so foul
Yet, those fondly attached to a certain craft,
To a tasty tipple, of a distinguished draft,
Does this sneak not creep, for to wreak its crime,
For in a mead’s no steed on which to hitch a ride.
See death dwells in the water, not the air,
Tis’ why, I peer outward, from a corpses stare.