No doubt the prospect of an infected thought,
seeded by a microbe’s lack of truth,
conjures scenes of horror and dismay.
It is easy to imagine pristine sentences
once vibrant and whole
twisting under the weight of contagion,
their meaning splintered,
their coherence rotting like fruit abandoned in the sun.

Such an infection does not announce itself with fever or rash.
It seeps quietly into the spaces between letters,
into the breaths between syllables.
At first, the changes are subtle.
A word becomes slightly misspelled,
its shape unfamiliar yet still recognizable.
But then the infection spreads.
Adjectives swell beyond their purpose,
swollen with exaggeration.
Verbs decay, losing their action.
Nouns fragment, sprouting contradictions like mold.

In time, entire sentences collapse,
their structure dissolving into incoherent babble.
Once-healthy paragraphs stumble
under the weight of distorted syntax,
reduced to gibberish.
And those who read them
those unsuspecting minds who take in the corrupted language
find their own thoughts infected, warped into mimicry.

It began in the libraries.
A single phrase repeated across volumes:
Truth is fragile.
Scholars argued over its origin.
They whispered that it had no author,
that it simply appeared.

By the time the infection was noticed,
it was too late.
Essays turned to riddles.
Instructions became circular.
Warnings faded into ambiguous riddles
that no one could interpret.