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hallucinating whiteness
with pharmaceuticals and weapons
tripping on false pretense
drunk off indulgence in assumption
shooting up black people into police veins
morphine government
numb to the people
America the anesthesiologist of the world
apathy is whiteness
complacency is getting frustrated about this
whiteness is the synthetic LSD
that too many people are used to
http://www.amazon.com/Escape-Liberty-Elan-Gregory-ebook/dp/B01B8XQYBG?ie=UTF8&keywords;=elan%20gregory&qid;=1459178234&ref;_=sr_1_1&sr;=8-1
Anais Vionet Dec 2021
I’m spending the Christmas holiday with Lisa and her family in NYC.

My parents are finishing 2021 in Africa, with “Doctors Without Borders.” “Step” (my step father) is a heart surgeon and my mom is an anesthesiologist, so they’re a traveling, self contained, double-dutch, operating theater. Yep, now that they’ve shuffled-off the dead weight of their children - they can finally have some FUN.

Here, in NYC we’re back in restrictive spaces as we face-down Omicron this holiday - but I still feel free. Our course work’s been dumb, but now we’ve escaped the strangling, slavery of tedious days - forget hours of reading, fact-sheets, writing essays, and solving chemistry equations - we’ve got 25 days of Christmas vacation!

Lisa’s having a sleepover tonight, friends Will and Karen are coming up (Lisa lives on the 50th floor, they live on the 46th) and we have every distraction known to man.

Tonight was supposed to be the building (220) Christmas party - a formal wear Christmas ball - with a live orchestra - but now (thanks Omicron) it’s an elevator party - we’ll go up to the 70th floor, pick up goodie bags and dinners then return yo-yo like, to Lisa’s.

We can escape our interior habitat to a large balcony where it’s windy and 34 degrees. The sky is a clear black, like an inverted cup of coffee and the stars look French. The city lights dazzle like a billion stars surrounding the black hole of Central Park.

Lisa’s dad is explaining to Karen (10), in some detail, how his shiny,  deluxe, outdoor barbeque - with it’s lid open like a radar dish, can detect reindeer and send updates to his phone in real-time - but Karen looks skeptical.

I hope you all have a wonderful, safe, Christmas and that the reindeer find you wherever you are.
Merry Christmas!
Sandra Lee Apr 2017
A trip to the dermatologist
Please check out this sore on my lip
And the one above it.
Yes, think I need to do biopsies of those.
Phone call-you have a basal cell carcinoma
And a squamous cell carcinoma.
We'll need to remove those and send you to the Plastic Surgeon.
That's a little concerning.  
I will tell a few friends and relatives
About my condition, but no big overall announcement.
One month later
Wake up at 4:30 am to eat breakfast
It will be a long day.
Take the dog to the neighbor for the day,
Leave for first hospital with Husband
Driving My Car!!! Scariest part of the day!
Check in to the Dermatologist
Numbing hurting needles to my lips and face,
Tissue cut away, searing hot cauterization.
To the waiting area and another cutting away of my lower lip.
Back to the waiting area. Four hours after our arrival
We are out the door, through the corridors to the parking garage
Back on the interstate to the second hospital.
Check in, ride the elevator and frighten a 5 year old boy with my
Face bandages-they were pretty frightening to me.
To the staging area to dress in a gown, have i.v. attached,
Anesthesiologist, Doctor, Nurses, and finally I start to go under.
Wake up with new bandages, ride home via drugstore and grocery-
12 hours later.  Study prescriptions and instructions.  Made it through the first night and hopefully to full recovery.
Warning-wear a hat, use sunscreen on skin and lips.                              Hope you will never have to take this trip.
krm Dec 2018
Anesthesiologist places mask on patient,
coaching easier breaths,
stillness.
Finished-
he leaves, leaves
leaves, leaves.

Surgeon enters with shiny tray of metal tools,
Patient’s rib cage rattles,
rapid breathing, sporadic monitor
panic breaks hospital windows
shattered,
everything is shattered.

Patient cries of days lived in uncertainty,
mutters about metaphorical agony.
Surgeon is insecure in performing procedure—
due to patient’s complaints,
“Pain is a parasite inside my ears, laying eggs inside the brain, where maggots squirm through my eye making a home in the skull.”
Patient feels no pain,
but screams of
impalement by life - -

God, what would your diagnosis be?
God claims, “the heart fights for purpose.”
Patient believes there isn’t one.
A suggestion;
reason with patient to make payment or rental of new
blood circulation, chambers, ventricles, valves, atriums.

Patient takes scalpel,
opening own chest
with hand inside
Patient is unable to find source of hurting
but reports numbness.

current status,
human.

—V.H.
A new method of medicine is emerging
Doctors shedding insurance companies purging
Enter into a contract directly with the doctor
IF YOU CAN AFFORD TO PAY

You too can have a  personal Doctor today
Approximately $2000-$10,000 will buy you
A General Practitioner
FOR THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD TO PAY.

Small print is how they hide the truth away
What does that mean ? Your private Doctor
Doctors predicated by the highest bidder.
Medical care is more of a babysitter,

Insurance make sure a doctor will not overcharge.
They Make sure doctors are not prescribing
Absorbent tests to pad their pocket
Insurance incentivize doctors not to prescribe tests.

Prognosis Cancer pray it’s benign
Expensive tests  doctors hard to find
Hurry up and wait your out of time
When money is a factor life is a crime

However private concierge, doctors
Do not account for hospital coverage
and charges occurred; anesthesiologist all Specialist
You need a contract with each of these doctors

PRIOR TO SERVICE impossible in emergency

SELF-SERVING
DOCTORS
DEMAND
TOP DOLLAR

(For those who can afford it )
give the doctor a holler

A typical doctor will carry 500 to 4000 patients
There are so many holes in this philosophy
People put themselves at risk.
Doctors maintain this is better for the sick

2 urgent patients need care , who wins,
The one who pays the most
What about the other patient?  Where do they go
to the father, the son in the Holy Ghost


Typically, a doctor can see four patients an hour
Fifteen minute increment per patient
Account for lunch paperwork bathroom
A typical doctor can see 24 in an eight hour day

Specialist will see less and charge 4 times more
First time, patient several grand out the door
Paying for this out-of-pocket,
The concierge doctor seems responsible sign lock it

Some people still have to retain regular insurance
And also paying for a concierge doctor.
Medicare has always been the gold standard
Now Drs refusing Medicare send patients away

Contracted Drs. can’t pick and choose who to see
some have private secondary coverage 100%paid
Doctors don’t know what insurance you have. Insurance mandates,Drs., to take all or nothing

What’s the problem? What happened? What’s going on? The heart of the issue never solved
The unspoken truth, your doctor is a business
They need to make overhead pay their bills

Medicare has adopted the attitude.
“We are bringing you thousands of patients
(For the most part), they won’t come in that often you make money regardless(.not true )

There are some high utilized patients the sick.
catastrophic. Cancer Terminal ill. The slow ****
The law of averages should make it beneficial for a doctor to have advantages as a medicare provider

That used to be true. But sadly NO Medicare’s reimbursement is low. Dr bill $300. Medicare allows $98. The doctor must w/o $202

The difference. Medicare only pays 80%.78.40
The 20% the patient pays or has second insurance
Dr. hires no experience, medical bills
A bad biller can destroy a practice within 6 months

Inspired song;

1) Bills
official video YouTube
By lunchMoney Lewis 2015

2) Doctor Wu
By Steely Dan 1975

3) Somebody Get me a Doctor
By Van Halen 1979

4) Down at the Doctor
By Dr. Feelgood 1978


Footnotes
BLT Websters word of the day challenge
4-5-25 Benign
Benign describes something that does not cause harm or damage. In medical context. It is used to describe something that is not threatening life as in a benign tumor.

FYI
Doctors are now turning away, Medicare patients
I currently drive an hour and a half to two hours to doctors as the closest available that will take my insurance. Concierge doctors is on the rise. I’ve had so many doctors. Tell me I don’t take any insurance. People will get sick. They will pay.
Then they asked me where do you go for medical service. I look at them earnestly and say oh no I don’t go to any doctors around here. What I’m really saying is I don’t go to self-serving money hungry doctors who milk the system.
But many people are not that savvy when it comes to doctors, they think of doctors as gods. I did Dr. credentialing I know better. When you’re looking at a doctor who’s on his fourth med legal in fraction almost ready to be kicked off of all insurance company lists and not able to have patience and we’re supposed to pretend this is a wonderful doctor for our staff. I handled the med legal cases example, a patient dies their file goes under lock and key on my desk and I have to find something else at fault, other than my doctor. The machine hadn’t been serviced faulty equipment  yeah
I was a certified biller and coder. Then I started teaching at a post secondary two year degree program for medical billing. I did doctor education throughout the United States worked on emergency hotline all different areas within the medical field. I had my own medical billing service business chain, doctors and staff how to build correctly Education classroom to their office.. the lack of education in these office is astounding when somebody tells you the balance is your responsibility, call your insurance and make sure they build it correctly. 33% of errors in billing and they try to build a patient unwittingly especially older patients pay it.. They might just be asking for doctor information.
Onoma Oct 2024
an amateur photographer waits till a room fills
up with degrees of connection--as people move
relative to prattle's false starts.
just when the deep space of universal greeting
collapses into conversation, the room's undulant
field registers unnatural spikes in noise level--
like supercells on a radar.
as if language showing first signs of fluidity, met
with the straitjacketed primitivism of listeners--
itching to go from zoo-like soundings, to being
seduced by the traction of their own voice.
at this the bluffy segue of wineglasses are tilted off
a tray--their long necks & lippy vaunts sparkling
to an ear-piercing parse.
a lens glares out of obscurity, as if the blue
shorts the blue--to blink back right there.
recoiling hands spastically thrown around deformed
hubs--with an anesthesiologist' catalogue of faces.
our photographer's delectation came from seeing it as
the discordia of the fifth wall.
Jonathan Moya May 31
I was expecting giants—brushstrokes that shaped history, colors that conquered time. But the walls whispered absence, their icons carried elsewhere, lent to hands that bear their weight.  

Only the quiet ones remained, anchored in the still air, aching to be adopted, longing for eyes to grant them meaning, a gaze that wholly loves their frail existence, to be taken in—cradled, fed, held close to the heart, nourished within the soul’s ache.  

I wandered the museum aimlessly until the bright colors of the exile wing drew me in—a modest room, slightly bigger than a living room, yet dwarfed by the grandeur of the main galleries, the mélange of American and European masters—into the parlor reserved for Caribbean and Latin artists. The air felt lighter, without the weight of displacement that clung to the masters before them.  

And among them stood the most majestic surprise. Hanging proud, slightly left of center, was “Children at the Beach,” a painting by Roberto Moya— my Uncle Bob.

I stepped closer, my heart quickening as the memory sharpened. It was almost all I remembered it to be when it hung as my abuela’s centerpiece— two girls and a boy with sun-golden locks, digging in the sand, one watching the other two unearthing what they hoped to be priceless treasures—maybe an old Spanish coin, a clam with pearl, perhaps a hermit crab finding the perfect refuge. I inhaled as I noticed the salt air tangle their hair, the ocean stretching beyond them in loose, unhurried strokes. Their joy was unframed by fame,  and they were hung in this house by familiarity— and no less eternal.  
    
But here, in this museum, the painting felt different. It no longer carried the warmth of a centerpiece or the quiet reverence of a family relic. It was orphaned among the forgotten and overlooked.  
  
I traced the exhibit label with my eyes. It was indeed Bob’s work. “Robert Moya (1931 - 2008” was a Puerto Rican painter, printmaker, and digital artist. Born in New York, raised between two homes—an identity split, stretched across borders.”

The description continued, but the words rang hollow. “Moya’s hands found lines before words…” A stylized version of his history, carved into museum language, stripped of the details my abuela had once storied us with.  I knew the real version—the restless childhood, the copying of Sorolla and Sargent, the drift toward abstraction, the heavy pigments, the quick strokes that pressed emotion into the image. The Bob I knew was not a plaque but a presence, yet here he was, reduced to a fact.  

In the somber, reverent light of my widowed Abuela’s living room, “Children at the Beach” had always existed in pristine warmth, its colors vivid, its figures untouched by shadow. But here, in this near-forgotten wing of the museum, it lived under different conditions—without the flattering glow of swivel spotlights, illuminated only by the raw, harsh Kelvins of recessed bulbs. The light was unkind, exposing details I had never noticed before, forcing every imperfection and brushstroke into full view.  

And then I saw it—something I had never seen in all the years of looking. Beneath the blonde girl digging in the sand, a faint pentimento emerged, the painted-over outline of a dark-haired boy. Under the only boy, a barely perceptible shadow of black curls. For the standing girl, the same. The golden-haired children had not been golden-haired at all. Their brightness had been layered over—an artistic wig, a deliberate revision meant to disguise what had initially existed beneath.  

Standing before his work, I felt a quiet sadness settle inside me. Was this how legacy worked? Was this how remembrance became an institution—neatly cataloged, distanced, no longer held within a family’s hands?  

But seeing it here, in this room of exile, in the hum of low-lit bulbs and hushed footsteps, I felt the weight of history settle differently.  

The painting was a certainty at my abuela’s home—a familiar presence, a relic of joy. Here, it became something else, something unsettled, that carried the quiet ache of displacement.  

Bob’s work was remembered and preserved but not exalted or held in the giants' spaces. I wanted to ask if he had ever imagined this—his brushstrokes caught between belonging and exclusion, a legacy measured but never fully embraced.  

For the first time, I wondered if he had painted for permanence or for profit, if each line had been an answer to a question only he could hear.

2.  

The boy who was erased and replaced was my father, Frank Moya—an anesthesiologist, Bob’s only and older brother. Five years gone, Bob seventeen.  

Once, they had moved in tandem, twin orbiting bodies drawn by the same hunger. Frank chasing form, Bob breathing life into color. One tethered to certainty, the other lost to the sway of pigment, chasing something unnamed.  

Talent is not inherited like blood. Frank’s hands were stiff and precise, designed for incisions, not creation. His lens saw only the present, never the shimmer of what lay beneath.  

Then came the unraveling. Success stretched between them like unspooled thread, love thinning the cord.  

Elsi—my mother—had been the axis. Bob painted her into permanence, bound her to canvas. Frank made her his wife, held her in his arms, and called her his own. But art does not forgive time.  

Beauty is rarely lost at once—it fades in the margins, in quiet shifts too delicate to name until absence is undeniable.  

She softened. Weight settled where grace had once lived. Diabetes carved itself into her bones.  

And Frank stepped back, distanced himself in increments, shrinking his presence before severing it entirely. He left, remarried, and claimed a new life apart from hers.  

Bob married, too, and had two sons. One found words in music, the other in blueprints and brushstrokes, his hands preserving what his father left behind.  

Then Elsi died.  

And that was when Bob laid his last offering.  

The pentimento came in mourning—an attempt at reaching back, at rewriting what had been. The boy blurred beneath the sand—an artist’s revision, but also something gentler, something aching.  

Bob never spoke his intent. Maybe he hoped Frank would understand and see the tenderness in the act. Maybe he believed his absence could make space for something new.  

But timing is the cruelest editor.  

Frank saw offense, not mercy. Rejection hardened in his throat, brittle and immovable. To the world, he was generous. But bitterness is selective, and he keeps his guard for Bob.  

So the painting became Bob’s last attempt—his last hand-stretched across time. And when the olive branch crumbled, Bob let the boy fade—not erased, not forgotten, but veiled beneath layers of ochre and cerulean.  

Standing before the canvas, I felt the weight of what could have been—a reconciliation never written, a bridge never built.  

In Frank, I inherited certainty, a mind fixed in practicality. In Bob, I inherited words—how they curve and press emotion into the image. But I inherited neither the brush nor the eye—only the ache of wanting to shape something real.  

I was born with the artist’s sight, but not his hand. My fingers fumbled where Bob’s flew. My canvas was words, tethered to Bob’s color.  

Yet here, in the hush of forgotten halls, I learned the craft beyond creation—how patience carves meaning, how absence sharpens sight.  

How memory, like paint, is layered, concealed, revealed only when light shifts just so.  

Poetry, like pentimento, is a lesson in seeing—what was, what is, and what lingers beneath the brush.
Eniale Dec 2024
tell me that I have potential
tell me I can do it if I try
tell me about my skin
tell me my skin shines

tell me I can be an anesthesiologist
tell me I can save lives
tell me that I am valued
tell me that I have rights

tell me to finish my education
tell me knowledge is power
tell me to use my voice
tell me it too has power

tell me I’m a woman
tell me I can be whatever I want
tell me I can make my own money
tell me I can flaunt

tell me I’m talented
tell me I’m art
tell me my beauty
tell me it races hearts

— The End —