Coleprosatic-mumpsile-flu

I think I have the Covid,
And a nasty Monkey Flu,
With a little touch of leprosy,
And mumps and measles too.
This horrible contagious mix,
Disease-y viral stew,
Is keeping me from work today,
That's why I'm calling you.

It's rare,
But all the symptoms fit,
Coleprosatic-mumpsile-flu.
I found it on internet,
Where everything is true.
It says that I'll miss work for months,
It says that I'll turn pink,
My fingers can't do typing,
I may struggle just to blink,
My tongue will likely swell up
And be wrinkled like a walnut,
And the only thing that I can eat
is donuts.

So please don't come and check on me,
I wouldn't want you ill.
I can suffer with the TV here
And all this time to kill.
I know how much you want to help.
I know you're going nuts.
Stay away,
But maybe
Send some donuts.

-B.C. Byron
I can’t (cough) make it to work today (cough), but maybe you could send some donuts to my way?

When I was smaller, I always got to look forward to a few things when I stayed home sick from school. First, my Mom would let me have all the lemon-lime soda and jello I wanted. Not that I could keep it down for very long, but it was exciting to be able to have sweet stuff all day, even if it was the only thing I could get myself to eat. The second thing I could look forward to was watching as much TV as I wanted. In those days, we only had 5 channels and none of them showed cartoons until after school time anyway. I slurped my jello and soda and watched 2 hour documentaries about the middle ages or the politics of South America with a barf bowl at my side. If I was feeling well enough by the afternoon, I could hobble over the Nintendo to blow on a game cartridge (we had to do that to make them work) and play video games for a while. It was great to get a day off. By the time I recovered, I had a renewed appreciation for school and actually looked forward to going back.

As an adult, I have much more entertaining things to do when I’m home sick. I have streaming movie services, a pile of books, and a cell phone with infinite downloadable games, but I usually spend the time off napping and worrying about the huge pile-up of work I get to go back to the next day. Thankfully, adults get to take vacation days when they choose (sometimes) when we can relax for real, without a barf bowl. Say, that reminds me – last time I visited my parents I actually saw the old plastic blue barf bowl. It really brought back memories. I should probably call my parents and warn them not to use that for salad or something.

Published by B.C. Byron

I’m a children’s author, poet, father of 3 girls, and electrical engineer. My first book, A Cat Named Lump, is now available on Amazon. It’s not for everyone – just those with a good sense of humor who stand a bit outside the norm. I have so many odd poems to share with the world, so I started this blog. Here I’ll post some poems from my book and many yet unpublished ones. If you like my work, please show support by buying and rating my book.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: