Craig Rozniecki's "Epidemic" is built like a charge sheet: a long list of privileges read out in a level voice, until one word turns the list into a diagnosis. The poem follows a person who is rich from birth, and the opening lines say as much: "Born with rights, / With privileges, / With money, / With connections." Nothing in this life is earned. Even the "Career decided at birth" arrives ready-made, along with the company to inherit. The central idea is that inherited wealth breeds an appetite that cannot be satisfied, and that this appetite has victims, among them the families hit by "downsizing" and the people "in shelters and on the streets."
The poem's form carries much of its argument. It has no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are short, flat and mostly end on a comma, so that the whole poem reads as one sentence that only stops at the final full stop. The effect is accumulation without a pause, which mirrors the behavior it describes: the speaker never stops to ask whether seven cars might be enough. The repeated "With" at the start works the same way, stacking up advantages like items on a shelf. When the poem turns on "Born into money, / Born into greed," it echoes its own opening "Born with," and the loop suggests a closed circle that those inside never have to leave.
The pronouns change as the poem goes on. At first the lines are impersonal, with no verbs of choice at all: "Career decided at birth." The wealthy person is something that happens to the world, not someone who acts in it. Then "you" appears: "As you sit with a cigar in your mouth." The poem now points a finger. The cigar is a stock image of the fat-cat tycoon, and the poet seems to want that obviousness. "Daddy's footsteps" adds a quiet jab, since "daddy" is a child's word, and the poem hints at someone who has never had to grow up.
The vocabulary of need and want is twisted throughout. "Seven cars isn't enough, / Three houses is too few" uses the language of scarcity for people who have plenty. "Another boat is essential" borrows a word that belongs to food and shelter, and "more profit is needed" does the same. Against this, the luxuries are dismissed as "more junk." Charity gets the same treatment: the "small donations" exist only "to rid yourself of any guilt," a phrase that treats guilt as an irritation to be cleared away. "Rid" quietly prepares the medical language of the ending.
The final lines carry the poem's biggest risk. "Becoming epidemic, / Just like those in shelters and on the streets" can be read two ways. Greed is spreading like a disease, and so is homelessness. The poem has already supplied the link between them in "At the expense of a family's income," where "expense" works as both a financial term and a moral one. The comparison is not neat, though. An epidemic is caught, while being "born into" something is inherited, and the poem uses both ideas at once. Perhaps that muddle is useful, because it suggests greed passes down in families and also spreads through a society that rewards it.
Not every reader will find the portrait fair. The rich figure is a type, not a person, with no inner life and no moment of doubt, and some may call that a caricature. But the poem's plainness seems deliberate. It doesn't ask for sympathy for anyone's complexity. It sets a family's lost income beside a purchased boat and lets the contrast do the arguing. What makes it worth studying is how much a simple list can do. Through repetition, a single pivot to "you," and one borrowed medical word, it makes inequality sound like something that spreads and could be treated, and it leaves the reader to decide who should be treating it.