CANCER
Eating causes pain.
screaming in the bathroom,
a burning red apple
in my intestines.
There is a desert in my body,
scorched and burning.
I walk around dry as a whisp of cloud.
I do not have cancer.
I do not have cancer.
And summer follows autumn
and all the dreams of my youth have come true.
FOR A FRIEND
I know a woman
who brushes her hair
as though it were a secret.
The mirror is a silver lake of loneliness.
She bristles
with unknowns,
her eyes brown
are things I’ll never forget.
white nightgown, October red sleeps on her fingertips.
Her children’s laughter is
her hope.
They rise with the dawn
and the steely cold
of southern maine.
She’s tough
and pretty,
and has all my attentions-
If only I weren’t ill
I could meet her expectations.
My heart is a ball of fire when I’m near her,
eating a hamburger at the table
lettuce on the corner of my lip.
She has me at night,
when I’m crying
in the bathroom
because the tumors
won’t let things pass.
But it’s,
off-centered,
and ill conceived-
why would such a woman
care about me?
If I can’t know God,
well, at least I know beauty.
FOR MY FATHER
On the couch
in my mother’s home;
the phone rings,
it was late June.
The quick, deep voice
of a doctor:
“It is cancer,”
My body
sinks into the couch.
‘I’m too young,’
I kept thinking.
‘Surely it hasn’t spread,’
and this boat ain’t sinking.
The phone dropped.
The scuttling of my mother upstairs;
my father reading on the patio
as I thought of what to say.
Her sweet smile,
the smile of a loving mother,
approaches me in the living room.
How can I have the heart to tell her
that her son may soon be in a tomb?
‘it’s cancer,’ I said,
standing straight
but eyes fixed on the floor.
I broke with her
and cried for what’s in store.
‘I have to be strong for dad,’
and be the man
he always wanted me to be,
not the coward
who wants to flee.
‘I ruined his life,’
he was to say later,
in a hospital hallway:
“I ruined his life,”
after we found out it had spread.
Stage four, Inoperable,
yer gonna end up dead.
I couldn’t let him think that,
my dear father,
the man who put up with my addictions,
and suffered through my life’s disorder.
I wasn’t meant to hear
what he had said,
so I texted him soon after,
letting him know he is a great father.
‘If it could only have been me,’
cried my father
on the way back from the first cat scan.
but if it had been him,
I’d be dead already.
OCTOBER IS MY HEART
There’s something about the slant of the sun
on an autumn afternoon-
the splash of sunlight on brick
that’s here, then gone too soon.
My heart is in October
where the dying leaves spring to life
and the light feels closer to god
a certain sheen that makes things new and right.
A friend once said, “Death and beauty are dance partners.”
and October plays the violin.
the blue is bluer and the red makes me blush too.
the face of a single leaf is a song in God’s heart,
written for me, written for you.
I’m being more and more convinced
that one’s inner state
has nothing to do
with one’s outer fate.
I can only explain
this run of tranquility
as a sweet gift from God-
sunlight amidst catastrophe.
I’ve been trying to figure this out-
this euphoric new freedom.
only to see the answer
scatter in the rainy season.
Sunlight splashes everywhere like a child.
I dash everywhere,
like a madman,
searching for the cause of this bliss
but every street is a near miss.
I thought I saw
a pair of gleaming green eyes
down India street
about sunrise.
’twas a hunchbacked thing,
dressed in fluffy shadow,
beckoning me on
over puddles, into the shallows,
’til the sight of my feet were gone.
My ability to live
had been greatly diminished,
but my desire to do so?
Well, I just know I ain’t finished.
It happened, somewhere these past two weeks
where a great terrible burden was lifted.
I just sorta woke up one day, free of fear-
of living, of dying, of you drawing near.
I remembered that I couldn’t remember
how to swim and my arms became jelly-
i’ve followed my hopes into the depths
only to find no answer.
My breath and my feet
have been bouncing on the street;
Oh, my breath and my feet
be pounding on the street.
The fatigue last up and left
like a dark breeze.
Now I’m wondering if i’ve been cured,
of this terrible disease.
I can see things in the clouds again.
I went hiking the other day
and I swear, the leaves whispered-
‘you’re gonna be ok,’
words from my almighty shephard