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The tumour like a hive
sends out its queens,
copies itself under limbs
and in hollows. Hotspot,
the pain is called:
a press, a match.
No, he says, a little fist,
a beat and clench. A voice.
Here at last is a woman's pain,
a pain of additions.
He swells. His spare face
softens.
This poem might or might not go into Ghost Maps,the book I wrote for my friend who'd been in World War II. He died of prostate cancer some years ago.
He swells, it sounds funny, wrong in that place.
bits of it don't make any sense to me, the "beat and clench. the voice".
All I can think of with metastasis is a Nova episode I saw where they were working on a cure for metastasis and they had mice which developed huge lung cancer tumors on their backs, and some were able to have no metastasis, so the graduate students collected mouse pee with a system of cages and funnels to help isolate the thing that helped.