Colloquy with Your Brain Tumor

by Redd Ryder

 

Why is it, you ask, that it never goes Dutch

Or shares the cost of your medication,

Your copay weighing upon you almost

As much as the prospect of death does. 

 

Several more months of this,

If the lump on your head doesn’t go halfsies,

You’ll be selling umbrellas on street corners

For your next fix of chemotherapy.

 

The last thing you want to hear from those sad-eyed nurses

Bending over you like housewives over a pram

Is “They regrow up so fast!” In your present condition,

Irradiant as a bridegroom, you couldn’t hokey-pokey your way

 

Out of a Shroud of Turin. You try to reason with it:

“This is one hell of a state you’ve left me in, old pal,”

Seeking, if not contrition, then remission, the wished-for miracle

Moldering in your closet like a spinster’s hope chest.

 

Expecting at least an for effort, with some length left

On your lifeline, you receive an on every blood test

Not the “OK, all clear” you were looking for.

            Must the Big C appear so prominently at parties

And on CAT scans that it scares your guests?

 

You scheme to shame rogue cells into leaving you alone,

Allowing that you’ve cheated on them

Once or twice with irritable bowel syndrome,

Comparing cancer’s brutality to the Visigoths’ sack of Rome.

 

“My parietal lobe is yours,” you concede, folding your hand,

Willing as Lord Chamberlain to fork over Sudetenland

And sign the divorce papers. Hairless as Yul Brynner’s Taras Bulba,

You beg, you plead, metastasis replying, —Not so fast, bub.

 

Your efforts at reconciliation are rewarded

With nothing but scorn, this growth on your noggin,

Formerly the size of a tick bite, more and more resembling

The nub of a rhinoceros’ horn, one lusted after for its sexual potency.

 

It seems the only thing you can get up now

            is the tumor’s reappearance. 

How you wish it had never been born, or you, and tell it so

With all the fervor of a religious zealot made painfully aware

That the surgeon’s laying on of hands hadn’t done the trick.

Previous
Previous

Carved Ivory Head of a Woman

Next
Next

Country Dinners