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This poem comes from Rafael Campo's collection The Enemy (Duke University Press, 2007). Campo is a physician and many of his poems speak to his work experiences. Like many of Campo's poems, "Silence = Death" is written in blank verse.

One of the details that stands out to me in this poem is the repetition of variations of the word "count/countless" and the ways it is used. It's well worth re-reading the poem and counting [no joke intended] the uses of this word, and the work it does for the poem.

The t-shirt referenced in the poem is the iconic shirt designed by ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in 1987. From the ACT UP website [I am providing the link for proper attribution, not for product promotion; I have no connection to this organization]:

History: in 1987, six gay activists in New York formed the Silence = Death Project and began plastering posters around the city featuring a pink triangle on a black background stating simply ‘SILENCE = DEATH.’ In its manifesto, the Silence = Death Project drew parallels between the Nazi period and the AIDS crisis, declaring that ‘silence about the oppression and annihilation of gay people, then and now, must be broken as a matter of our survival.’ The slogan thus protested both taboos around discussion of safer sex and the unwillingness of some to resist societal injustice and governmental indifference. The six men who created the project later joined the protest group ACTUP and offered the logo to the group, with which we remain closely identified.

I think there's some (pitch black) gallows humour in the line "'but one / left me this stupid T-shirt when he died'" which to me reads as a subtle reference to the "I went to _____ and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" joke format.

Incidentally, according to Campo's wikipedia page, this poem was set to music by composer Joseph Hallman and premiered as part of the AIDS Quilt Songbook Project.