- Non-Erotic Poetry
- Neoplasms
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Two days before they tell you that you have cancer,
a ranger at Mammoth Cave warns folks not to board the
bus if they have medical issues, because cave walks
can be quite stressful.
You get on the bus. Two hours later, you quite literally
cross the River Styx.
It starts as a quark soup.
nothing but a complex chemical reaction.
The day they tell you that you have cancer,
You watch the manatees at the Cincinnati zoo
swim in their glass prison, then you stagger right past McDonald's,
you don't eat, you don't pass Go.
Then the photons start flying.
watch me coalesce,
That's when they start
taking things out of you, pumping the
lethal toxins directly into your bloodstream and giving you
a free weekly radiation suntan.
You see people getting their mufflers repaired,
scurrying to work, and you wonder why.
Then atoms and stars form.
for a decade or six,
Sixty-five days after they tell you that you have cancer, you watch the
lunar eclipse, thinking it will be your last.
One star goes red giant and swallows up the last conscious bacterium as it frantically swims in a boiling sea.
disintegrate into my constituent atoms.
620 days after they tell you that you have cancer, you sit there
watching your heart on TV
with your newly appointed cardiologist friend. He enthusiastically points
out all the parts that have just died. It's a helluva show.
The giant itself is eaten by a ravenous wormhole,
just one Russian doll inside another.
you can watch me do it all over again.
2,592 days after they tell you that you have cancer,
you watch yet another lunar eclipse.
- COMMENTS
sandybabout 13 years agovery strong poem...wonderfully done. I enjoyed the way you connect your personal experience to the cosmos.
Maria2394about 13 years agonarrative, I would have given it an E. I love the way you weave the small existence of human beings in with the enormity of space. I think this will go into my faves list. I was overwhelmed by the strength of this work. Excellent!
~maria
twelveooneabout 13 years agogave it a 5, it is interesting more than most, poetry, I don't know.
Adding only I hope this is a literary fiction, if not I hope you beat it, 2,592 days, if you haven't already.
