A Tumour as Big as.......

He was a taxi-driver, maybe,
Balding, large and looking older than his years –
It’s one of those occupations
Which seems to do that to people -
With the picture propped up unconvincingly,
Grainy, grey and which way up was it,
You couldn’t quite tell?
A tumour as big as a football,
The headline read,
Eight inches or so.
He’d been through several doctors,
And those practice nurses,
Pleasant enough but sometimes not so sharp.
Pain in his back and legs
Was how he described it,
Put down to his sedentary lifestyle
And crumbling joints
Or shredded nerves around his coccyx, maybe.
He made it to the X-ray department
In a provincial hospital,
Badly finished and already leaking,
But they missed it, every one –
The student doctors,
Still with stethoscopes
(But they are on the way out),
The big cheese
And all the middle-rankers in between.
It has spread, the copy explained,
Disseminated, metastasised,
Different routes to a shared destination.
With fifteen minutes of fame,
Fond fantasies of cure,
The quest for consolation:
Our lives and hopes and deaths
The same.