I am overweight
I can’t give you the figures
But I can give the facts
That I have a redoubtable belly
And a full-body-enveloping layer of flab
Interlarding some pretty impressive musculature
I have always inclined to stoutness
Although the lean years of the early seventies
Made me lean
When I drank and smoked more than I ate
Huge intake of alcohol
And it’s not like I didn’t like food
Which predilection I heartily indulged
Once given the chance
And from that time a crapulent way of life
A boundless uptake of nourishment liquid and solid
But
I lost a few pounds after the inauguration
For years I’d had the thought that I must quit drinking
I fell up the stairs and puked myself
Late January 2016
And I’ve stayed sober
Save for sneaking an occasional toke
And when came the time of confinement
I gained the COVID 15 or maybe 20
But
To speak of my physical complaints
They are legion
Many traceable to my corpulence
And so tracing from bottom to top
The soles of my feet are subject to tormentous bouts
Of itching painful neuralgia
A single needle from base to foot’s crown
Coated with mosquito’s saliva
But
This false signal of uncanny injury
Responds quickly to analgesic
And apparently indicates no malady more vicious
Than a single nerve trodden upon by enormous bulk
And thence moving upward past the clattering knees
To that bottom we call the bottom
Four decades of hemorrhoids have humbled me
And brought me low
Recently many weeks of painful and repeated ligature
Effected with the warning
That the rectal demons possessing me would probably recur
Resulted only in the doctor’s sigh that
Well
Everybody has hemorrhoids one time or another
Which is exactly equivalent
To the wisdom of the old woman in The Ladykillers
Who observed that the world’s got two kinds of folks
Them that’s got piles and them that’s gonna get ’em
And the wasp-colored residue
Which I must cleanse assiduously
Frankly expresses perennially and painfully
The body’s fallibility
The cleansing itself an injurious procedure
And moving up to the stomach
Site of the gastro-esophageal reflux disorder
About which little need be said
Since it seems well-manage so far
For thirty-five years with acid blockers
Though left untreated it can kill
Unpleasant thought
And into the heart muscle
Whose atria like to fibrillate
No treatment for this one
But you better reduce the clotting factor
For with all that churning and agitation
The embolisms will aggregate
In an expeditionary force
Headed straight via carotid to the brain
There to cause apoplexy
Traditional demise of the old fat and angry
And so upward we go to the pulmonary apparatus
And especially the naso-pharyngeal region
Locale of also-deadly sleep apnea
Strongly implicated with obesity
Though impinged-upon cranial nerves no doubt also obtrude
So I treat the cessation of breath with pressurized nose hose
But
Here I point to some discipline
Some powers of application
For the schnozz-inflating appliance
Took considerable getting used to
And lots of folks can’t do it I hear
So I’m a good boy
With seasonal allergies for all seasons
And onward to the jugular foramen
The pièce de résistance
Where dwelleth the glomus jugulare
Or is it a schwannoma
The experts remain at variance
Cancer and non-cancer more a spectrum that a binary state
The large mass I heard about in a phone call
Following an MRI
In 2006 I noticed lingual symptoms
And it’s amazing how poor one is
At knowing what’s going on
Is my mouth dry
Maybe from the prescriptions or non-prescriptions
Or are nerve endings damaged
In an alarming uptick in bitings of the tongue
If nerves they’re motor nerves
For the sensory nerves are fully painfully functional
Or is it all in my addled head
No
I can point my tongue to the left but not to the right
I can tickle with my tongue
The upper left molars
But not those on the upper right
And forget about scooping peanut butter
Out of the inner lip
One doctor an ear nose and throat man said
Your tongue looks fine to me
Irresponsible unfeeling wretch
Months later said another doctor a pulmonologist
My God have you had a stroke
The imaging procedure discovered the tumor
The size and shape of an egg
Ensconced in the cranial drain hole
Which aperture it had in charming medical parlance
Drastically remodeled and enlarged
Like the open concept of a house-flipping show
And daily for six weeks my head was bolted to a table
While a robot arm out of Star Wars
Positioned and repositioned and bzerp bzap
Fractionated radiotherapy
And I a victim of mild radiation sickness
Unnaturally sickly tired
My body demanding food
Misreading the illness as low blood sugar
Gained 25 pounds in a few weeks
And I thought cancer treatment was supposed to make you skinny
Felt hot for months and years thereafter
Effect I suppose of new layers of insulating blubber
My productivity at work fell off
I was going to be superman and blow through it
Never took a day off
I was kind of depressed
The bastards fired me a cancer patient
Or more truthfully
Refused to renew my contract
Thereby leaving me effectively fired
I had told them that the large mass was non-malignant
Which to everybody except those who know
Means benign
Though the doctors themselves remained at variance
But
I got the last laugh
When ten years later
The tumor ungrowing but still present
Destroyed the auditory nerve
And I became suddenly and completely deaf in one ear
And it turns out losing even just one ear is bad
Especially since the remaining one
The one I would forever after depend upon
Had sustained rock and roll damage
And people smirked when I told them
That my one-sided total hearing loss owed to a tumor
And not to self-indulgence with the electric guitar
And cymbals were at least equally culpable
In damaging the one good ear I had left
It’s not that good
And cancer or no
I tried to tell you
The large mass fucked me up
And I almost forgot hypertension
Deadly condition that requires a daily physic
That somehow or another blocks beta