What is Truth?

I hate the smell of the hospital with my entire being.

The whiteness of it all, the sanitary smell, and the robotically given truth

Seemingly beset me in the form of parasites crawling into me.

Images of the dead prick at my conscious whenever I am here,

So, I told myself: “Never again”.

Yet, the universe has turned against me and here I lay.

She questions me, “Does this hurt?” on repeat as I lay

On the bed with the crinkling sheet. Fast forward, then another presses on my being

And I think, for a second, ‘How many times will I have to do this again?’

Again, and again. Different faces and various ages will speak the one truth.

They tell me I will have to come back here

Again. It's never anything new for me.

Sometimes I feel so alone, even when they tell me

I’m not. But I am, take now as I lay

Alone on another version of the bed with the crinkling sheet here

In the room with an unsettling machine that will scan my being.

It’s an attempt to find another version of the truth.

Except it ends with the same one again.

They tell me they still don’t know what it is again

They will have me

tested once more ‘till they can give me another version of the truth

and so, I lay

on another bed with the crinkling sheet as they test my being

with more pricks and pokes. While I deliriously plea, ‘Please take me away from here’.

I have bruises here

On the inner corners of my arms again.

There are old and new aching pains ranging throughout my entire being.

Still, all I can think is ‘I carry the white rooms dead with me’.

At the store, at the playground with my nephew, and even more vividly as I lay

At home in a room a different shade of white. They speak to me of my truth.

What hurts more than the dead are the living. Each time I speak of the one truth,

I deal with the burden of witnessing how the blows of reality damage here

— A home that used to house laughter. Now, the dead lay

In the corners dressed in my same blue gown. I force my gaze toward my parents again

And wonder if the image of me

Dressed in a blue gown will follow them home too and haunt their very being.

I share hurting gazes with beloveds and wish the act of simply being

Alive was not so difficult. Doctors have no answers, but the dead have spoken of one for me.

The illness still spreads and soon I will join their side in that same blue gown. That is my truth.