HEY OLD MAN
How come you work so hard to live? Home is a ragged trailer with TV for company. Maybe your brother comes over for awhile, or the grandkids leave their bikes in your yard. Every night, your daughter hooks you up to the fluid that mimics your kidneys. Each day you drag your weak leg to the naugahyde chair, fall in and drift between the sets of exercises I insist you do. I mark your name in the column that counts toward my quota.
You keep smokes close at hand, sit on the porch in a mildewed chair looking at the garden you can’t tend. Do you dream of planting pole beans when you doze in the morning sun? Wounds won’t heal, bacteria bloom like algae in your abdominal fluid. No nursing home will take you, dialysis costs too much, no money to be made. Your family signs for the surgery that takes one leg, then the other. Is hobbling to the shade to watch the kids play wiffle-ball in the gravel drive enough? Another surgery, this one to route blood to your rotting limb. I wish, “Give up.”
