"The
Cancerboy Diaries: Entry the 5th"
Poetry by Michael F. Nyiri
March 2nd, 2006 4:24 a.m. pst.
Were miracles supposed to
happen,
and was life a subtle joke played
on the Universal Psyche
after all
We cannot tell,
and so we blithely ignore the disasters
when we can
in order to concentrate on happier times.
We joked about the lack of nausea
You still had your thick head of hair
Each week more poison was ordered
and inserted into your failing body
Each week more laughs were shed
Like nervous embarrassing moments
Each week the timer's spring
seemed ever so slowly to loose
and with it feelings of superiority over
life itself.
Mephisophelean Cancer cackles
as he draws his bloody sickle across
your years, months, and days
We could never laugh as hard as he.
Why couldn't you have listened
when I offered to accompany you
on out of state trips, to lavish lunches,
to any form of forgetfulness
while we still have "time".
But you didn't
As Usual.
Others would joke with me in the past
about your lackadaisical outlook on life.
Now that the shutter could close forever
did you change your ways
and endeavor to feel the fulsome power
of life's happinesses before they were snuffed?
No, and no again,
As Usual.
Even I, who lives in close proximity
to this suffering calamity
thought for a moment that everything
would be "okay"
but then the other morning I heard
you in the bathroom, where the
cough became a nagging reminder
that poison is being injected weekly.
You had decided on the lavish lunches
and yet each time I ask you to go with me
The Cancer and the Chemo have other plans.
Now you are sick
Sick with this debilitating disease
This malignant monster which
married your health
and threw away the key.
Your face looks tired and sags
Your smiles aren't healthy
And you move slower and less certain
than in any time I've known you.
As I think that I would
want to remember
some better times, and discussions
from the past,
Coke fueled evenings in Long Beach
listening to music as we
tag teamed the record player.
We haven't played our records for each other
in years, until the other night,
trying to find a shared normalcy
that doesn't exist anymore,
As I think that I hardly know you
As you slowly wither away,
and as your full head of hair,
finally becomes ready to shed,
and follicles in the sink
serve as yet another sad timepiece
ticking with uncertain certainty
As I think about the future loss of existence
we will all experience,
I wish you well,
even as we laugh
because we dare not cry.
I turn another page in the diary
and wait with you,
as the cough,
and the hair loss continue
and the minutes tick
as always
but with a harder sound.
Poetry
2006
