DIMINISHED

I thought I had been here before. That mole
on my neck that turned ugly.  The dimple on 
my left breast just below the nipple.
The shadow on my chest x-ray.
Close-calls don’t matter now.

My doctor sits on a padded stool, my file
splayed open like a girlie magazine on his desk,
his lips, like the wheels on his stool moving,
making noise. My mind stuck on “cancer”
and “tumors” with an “s.”

The exam room echoes the scratch of his pen.
The hand at the end of a white sleeve scribbles
chart notes, a referral, a piece of paper
placed in my hand.

My ticket to the end of my life.
Admission to a world of chemicals and toxic procedures
so invasive I cannot grasp their horror.

I know only that his stool has four casters,
he is left-handed

and my voice is too small.

Let me slip into that moment between crisp pages
where strangers like chess pieces play out their lives
line by written line.

On hot cocoa vapors I ride words, saddled in afghan comfort,
composing tragedians who reel against horrors
so wonderfully not mine.

Tethered above chores, let me drift aloft to linger
along streets I will never walk, adventurous trails I will never seek;
to quiver and finger visions of places like so much verbal chiffon.

Too soon, a call, the door, some undivine
intervention splits my cloud, sucking me back to earth.
My euphoric ascension ripped,

solemnly I mark my spot between white sheets
stashing my pen until I can again abuse it,
longing to slip once more into that moment.