Poetry Challenge Day 152 (Sat Mar 5)
Writing a poem about death is not
something I planned to do.
Thanks to a book given to me
by a certain special someone,
it’s something I’ve actually given
some thought to recently.
But fortunately for you
(at least for now)
this is not about my
philosophy on death,
this is about my near death experience.
The other day I cancelled my Dermatology appointment.
(I did it online.)
A couple of hours later
I noticed I had a voice message.
“This is Calvin from Dermatology calling back,
it looks like you have cancer
and I wanted to see if you’d
like to make an appointment.”
My first reaction was
how the hell did he come to that conclusion?
I haven’t even been seen before,
but the voice of reason skips over the obvious
and goes straight to obscure.
Curious and a bit worried
I called back.
After waiting on hold for 20 minutes
(Thank you COVID)
I got through to a person
and explained the phone message.
The person I was talking to
assured me they would not have
left a message like that,
so naturally I read it back to her.
After discussing this for a few minutes
we came to the conclusion
that the voice message must have
used the word “cancer”
in place of the word “cancelled.”
(I’ll leave it to you to go back
and reread the message, but it does fit.)
After making some idiotic comment
about advising Calvin to slow down
and enunciate his messages more clearly,
I hung up feeling much better.