The Spine Of Shadows

When my father, seventy three summers old, was hospitalized

because his kidneys weren’t behaving themselves,

apprehensions turned into assumptions in no time.

Especially after the doctors delivered a verdict rather discerning, 

"An intensely enhancing mass lesion

at the lower pole of the right kidney."

I never knew hurt could be so geographically accurate.

I never knew diagnosis could bleed verses in its veins.

I never knew an obnoxious lump of unnecessary flesh

could speak in anything but obscenity.

Dads and daughters are a world of their own, 

I had been told time and again.

Watching my sister and father growing up

never convinced me of a truth otherwise.

His fondness and affection,

her admiration and worship.

It was symbiosis by blood.

I was told I am to be a son to my father:

a shadow to fill in what was missing in the flesh,

a man to live up to the name of another.

Because that is legacy,

and patriarchy demands sons

to be slaughtered at the altars of inheritance.

But how do you become a son

to a father that wasn’t there?

How do you become the silhouette

when the flesh and spine are missing?

The ones who grow up on love

and the ones who are raised by survival

age different, perceive unalike.

So when my sister called in a fit of frenzy,

I couldn’t tell if it was a daughter

concerned for her father,

or an overgrown baby spine

so brittle it could not bear daylight truth

without overdosing on panic.

I was unacceptably calm.

And composure doesn’t suit blood well, I’ve been told.

Maybe I am a bad son — unworthy, ungrateful.

I told myself so,

as if repeating the accusation

might summon the wound,

might scrape a single tear off the edge of my eyelid.

And yet nothing.

All I could ever think was, 

is the panic warranted?

My sister imagined the worst of the worst.

And though I can be outrageously imaginative

in metaphor and in viscerality,

I am stubbornly bland,

mundane to the marrow

when it comes to conjuring crises.

A boy who once hoped to end the man

long before the man in him began

only ever buys imagination

when it is bound in paper and sold as fiction.

But guilt sold to you as a child

can never be sold back.

What breaks in the bone

can never be repaired by blood.

And what begins as a lesion on a kidney

becomes the map of an inheritance;

a geography of absences,

a diagnosis that pens its poetry

straight into the marrow.