Taking Stock

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 TAKING STOCK


— a birthday poem


Well, let’s see. Thirty years of this 

and nothing to show for it but 

one life, which has turned out to be far more

mundane than the lives of those other

thirty-year-olds I fought alongside

as a kid on missions out back, 


but I have two daughters and a wife

who appreciate my mundanity, 


and then there’s still this wild hope 

to reckon with, the dormant one

ever growing inside of me

alongside the cancer cells likely

just beginning to stretch molecular legs, 


and if trajectory means anything

will continue growing until they discover it 

too late to remove and declare me

a case with no remission.


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