if it’s privilege, you will know

trE
Photo by Josh Hild via Unsplash

you are yearning to
go out while I
simply want to stay in

safe from the fevered patients
I screen, often misdiagnosed
pneumonia is a lie
doctors tell them
to keep from testing them
accurately

and I pray for my friend
recently the owner of
results that will
take a quarantine period
to alleviate
away from her family
a mountain of
positivity
is needed

I channel my
extra portion
and send it to her

one of my cousins
found my Great-Uncle
dead in his home,
his flimsy body
riddled with pain
shut-in, cast off
from others, a virus
claiming his soul

you are yearning to
go out while I
simply want to stay in

I see the numbers
I tally the cost
overwhelming hurt
rising in smiling faces
with tearful eyes,

demeanors shattered
and tossed about like
yesterday’s garbage

privilege smells like
piss in a dark alley
day old and sun baked

my cousin does his rounds
at a prominent hospital
in Queens, his colleagues
dying left and right
from the very thing
they’re fighting

I ask God to cover
him just as he’s covering
me. how would our
people take two deaths
at once?

if it touches your family,
claims your friends,
& piles up in every corner
where you turn,

tell me, will you still
be so eager to go
out then?

What I do for a living? I register patients for various imaging scans and invasive procedures and one of the scans we are doing far more of than we ever have before? Chest X-rays. Many patients are being tested for Coronavirus COVID-19, many of them have been diagnosed as having pneumonia. While most of those diagnoses have proven true, some of them have not.

My Great-Uncle was found dead in his home by one of his children while at home recovering from something people still believe doesn’t exist. A good friend of mine recently tested positive for COVID-19. When you see what I see, live what I live, and work where I work, you don’t need the news or a politician or a doctor telling you what’s going on, you experience it for yourself.

All of you, please take care and be well. If I’m not as active on here for a few days here and there, that’ll be because I’m exhausted and flitting between many emotions. Peace.