Grave Lumas And Wishbags Monologue

Grave Lumps & Wishbones

Like all stories told late in a man’s life, this one begins with his prostate. A calamitous long distance phone call to a Father’s daughter will end it. Double stuffed between these two crisp cookie shell perspectives is a rich, hokey-pokey, cream filling. So, cheek to cheek and with happy feet, follow the pied piper’s lead and march locked in step with the carnival’s Conga line to the rhythmic, stylized soft shoe three step shuffle (and kick), of this picnic choreographed three-legged marathon narrative. Shake your booty and pegged leg, then trip to the life fantastic for this rebooted, Father-Daughter’s last tango’d waltz. Vicariously, all together now, let’s: dip, dunk, twirl, and turn yourself around, because
It is an affliction upon the ears, like a swarming plague of busy, buzzing mosquitos, tasking me on the chase around perdition’s flames. Why don’t you just die already? Post-prostate, the first tumor they remove is from his lung. So much more than just a damned spot on the MRI and X-ray films — Out I say! He doesn’t cough anymore, hardly; but, when he does, the cacophony stabs at me, like Vincent’s dull palette knife. My cochineal tin ear is not yet Quasimodo deaf to the ringing, digitized bell of the hospital’s chapel — for whom will it toll
Fling the cancerous stone enough times and the giant falls. He refuses the required surgery, despite the handsome nurses and new wonder drugs. His body has betrayed him. Once as big as a moose and loose as a goose, he looks confused and shrunken, as if he’s drunk…straight from a poisoned bottle — which in fact, on doctor’s orders, he has — or swallowed whole one of Alice’s reducing elixirs.

With needles embedded vein deep and protruding from an anemic forearm, he pretends all is well and sleeps away the bustling hospital’s eighteen hour day, like immortal heroin addicts nodding off in a small corner of the park, vainly searching the compass for anything other than the needle tracked arms of Morpheus to hold their abridged attention spans, while examining empty time cards on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Sweat soaked palms and swarthy terrors saturate his night. In raven black wingtip brogues, the mailman’s gloom delivers inclement dreams and stormy nightmares, resurrecting his waking anxiety. The Sandman is most unkind and in the Land of Nod he finds no weary respite from sleep gasping apnea, or the monsters under his bed. The tell-tale ribcage rapping of his heart wakes him, pounding wildly as if he’s just lost a death match foot race to a Nike shod, Frankenstein’s closet monster; but, in due course, he makes his peace with the gamboling ghosts upon the floor, by watching the lambent shadows of Late Show reruns and infomercials. So little time