The Lump (Round 2)
Let us workshop a poem about a teen boy’s hypochondriacal struggle with a physical abnormality on which he obsessively focuses (perhaps to avoid seeing the bigger terrors of his living condition)
The Lump Smackdab on his forehead he found in bed that shadow over his teens. Mirrored fingernails squeezed to no avail, his pain-pilled mom slurring on the toilet about pimples “unripe”: the pockmark perils of premature harvests. Yet from all flanks of the bulge, midnight disquiet dug in desperation to deliver it from pus—in time, to deliver himself from an ominous murmur that it harbored none. He knew at twelve, grandparents dead, how malignancy seemed to multiply when messed with—mobilized even by “the best” surgeons. As the purpled region throbbed under blood-stanching toilet paper, until dawn he feared what bee swarm his morcellations might have unleashed. Minds insist upon relief. His came in the hope to find the lump gone once the wound of his neurosis healed. The lump remained, morning after morning. But faith, relentless, left no question that it could be obliterated somehow. One midnight of panic, his left thumbnail pinned it just right against his skull, leaving no escape. He squished with fine-motor maneuverings to ensure no portion would slip, side-step, the focused flattening— a cornering violence that became a once-an-hour ritual. A bowl-cut, bangs thick on the forehead, hid the war. No bigger deal than a closed-eyed touch of your nose, he could flatten that mortality symbol with casual ease too swift to raise a flag even for eagle-eyed onlookers. Still, any pride gleaned from his covert marksmanship, or from his discipline to crush all uprising, was eclipsed by the fear of an ever-narrowing window for salvation. Nauseated by 1995’s nonstop loop of the song “Lump” by the Presidents of the United States of America, anxiety swelled until he was forced to share the secret that would explain why he kept his back to winds, why he had that absurd haircut still—why he was sad. Years of fixation (allowing at best an hour of respite) only met with “Ingrown pimple” between his mom’s opiate nods. The nail that for most of us is tapped home in steps, instead was hammered flush in one blow that night: even mothers do not know what the hell is going on here. Terrified to learn of impending doom from whitecoats (exotics he saw in his poverty mainly on the show ER), that lump upon which he lumped his every trouble he began squash-mangling with a pen back in abandon. Fear of cancer spreading from such warfare warranted, he felt, escalating the warfare. Scabs of callous, keratin like his nail, he picked off in knowingly-deluded hope each time to have picked away at least some of the lump. His front teeth would pulverize each hardened remnant, the idea—also knowingly-deluded—to torture not just it but the mother in his head he imagined it still bonded to. A saving grace from the daily ordeal of Aquanet bangs, which made him look more comical than his lump could, came when despite downcast eyes at the mall he spotted a headband. Stolen, it became his identity. His hair back flashing not an organic lump but a corporate swoosh, he could run off his melancholic heft—worries reduced to classmates ripping it off or asking why it is always on. The elephant in the room, musky from its constancy, had him shy around girls. But hormones and delusion sufficed to break the barrier. Nude except for the Nike, he prayed his first would not voice wonder as to why— even here—it remained on. A more reasonable prayer would have been that her home too was of such squalor: carpet redolent of bleached shit, the window cardboard. Bondage to the band proved unsustainable, in the end, to a life worth living. What employer would tolerate it? What bride would ever allow it to grace their wedding? Dare he have it on in the delivery room, the deathbed? Years left alone behind the band had the lump return to flesh color. A rerun of Last Action Hero had settled it. If Frank McRae could freely sport his lump, so could he.
This poem is unpublished