They said it was a tumor and here we are thirty years later looking at it.

in words, a description, the xray is absent. 

Still benign, Still clicking in place. The knee is unaffected.

Click, click, click pen.

They didn’t send for my wife. They didn’t ask me to jot down some notes.

They never do. They always draw up short then. Tag lip to lip.

I’m seated alone in a room. Looking at a 45-year-old knee that just doesn’t hurt.

Straight. Down. This big, in a small sized okay hole. Bend. Rest Weight. Don’t do that.

ever again as if your life depended on it. As if the world didn’t care your wife was not there.

As if the world didn’t care that your mom had the same toxins in her body for 40 long year.

And never died, and she didn’t die. As the blood coursed through her system, rampant, rabid.

She didn’t die and you had her, and you called her every day.

Click. “You sure?”

The years of exhaling personal madness—rabid.

Pain, what it is, muting the illness of a fairly simply knee.

Cut, snip, stich. Not so easy on the brain. I wince.

No. Really. I know. The x-rays said it was the size of a quarter. A knee-cap quarter sized you joke inwardly. It wasn’t really funny. You show him how big you think it is.

It doesn’t hurt. Take my money. It doesn’t hurt. Never really had but 10 days a year.