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 A for effort, with some length left
On your lifeline, you receive an F 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.