December 3, 2019

She was displayed before me
with her eyes closed
and mouth agape,
leaving me to wonder whether
she died in terror or awe.

Was her last breath
the honest gurgle
I’ve been seeing
for the last few days,
that I took comfort
in hearing restart
every time I called her name
between bouts of irregular apnea
(our last little private game)-
or the silence caused by Benadryl?

All I know is that
the call came at 6 am
and I spent one hour with her
and then walked into
the last of the darkness
and the first of the light.

My first breath outside the hospital
stretched back thirty years
and each tear was
full of joy and sorrow,
the ash of memory.

By the time I got home
the long movie
I had shared with her
was over.

January 3, 2020

Now, hope fails me.
Grief is my truth.
Yet, I refuse to be
deluded by grief
nor abandon hope
one month since
your passing.

Your death was your
greatest gift to me
and now I must struggle
with how to live with it
and accept it kindly
because in the end
you folded your life into my timeline,
fitting everything and all neatly
between my cancer and cure.

For 10,604 days-29 years, 12 days
I am grateful  for the
joy only you(I) can embrace
the sorrow
just only you(I)  can endure.

Every cut is a bleeding thorn,
every breath is a spread of fingers.
The ear records all its silences.

Lose a hand and it goes to the trash heap,
lose an ear and everyone will think of Van Gogh.

In the landfill
the hand discovers fire,
it discovers how to conquer the rats,
how to drive,
how to see the light,
how to play
as a child in the soft sand,
how to think to its advantage,
how to grow beyond
touch and feel,
how to taste the apple,
how to hear
the silence of the din,
how to love,
love itself,
the world,
the universe-

to think of itself
as something other
than a horror concept,
to think of itself
as a piano virtuoso,
to think it’s worth a body,
(not worth the bother of a body),
worth a companion five fingers,
(unworthy of mating with other digits)
all while ******* a doll’s head.

Thinking it’s worth a *****,
its palm forming a ******
but ultimately deciding
it’s not worth
the extra useless appendage
and the lifelines-


tasting the rain and discovering
it’s not an umbrella
just a receptacle to hold one.

It gets soggy, wrinkled.
It gets sick.
It gets cancer.
It loses its fingers
one by one.
Its creases wither.
It dies
and blows away
in the wind.

Its body mourns
its phantom limb,
stretches it new
mechanical appendages
and moves on.

I am a Vitruvian Man
marked out like an anatomy lesson
in black and green dye,
something to align against the mean,
a mold made of sheets and plastic
to aim the mechanical eye
to revolve its rays around.

I can’t move because the machine
requires mathematical silence
to perform its cure, so the nurse
must tug me into place.

I get lost in the hum of the circle,
lonely bagpipes playing a dirge,
maybe Amazing Grace,
maybe Scotland the Brave,
maybe the last graceful notes
of my own dying world,
maybe it’s just noise.

Somewhere there
is a small echo of God
that almost gets lost in the creation
of algorithm and code,
smothered in my general deafness,
the unbelief that He would touch me
at my weakest point
like a biblical character.

The scan stops.
The mold is done.
The nurse lifts me gently up
making sure my feet touch the floor
before letting go.
She smiles and reminds me
that the end is just 25 treatments away.

I want to greet the new year
with 20/20 eyes,
knowing that cure dances
on the edge of hope’s grave
and that in this biblical year
of flood, cancer and death
that grief is just a
short term companion.

Tomorrow time
will step me away,
leaving only memory
and the long walk
to the horizon.

Miriam wept.
as she gave birth
to her first born son
in the great room
of her parents windowless house
because there was no space
for her in their guest room.

Miriam wept
amidst the smell of
animals lulling in the stables,
the stench of blood and life,
pouring from her womb
in circles of pain, joy
and the fear of death.

Miriam wept
as she swaddled him
in the bands of linen
the midwife gifted her,
now their only rich thing,
and wept again
in the soothing waters of the Mikvah

Miriam wept
remembering the small voice
that had once whispered
inside her with a thousand hallelujahs
and the acclaim of a heaven of angels
proclaiming him the redeemer.

Miriam wept
unaware of the indifferent
shepherds tending their
flock in the sweltering night,
watching the convergence
of Jupiter and Venus
blessing the heavens
all the way to Persia.

And knowing that Miriam
treasured up all these things
and pondered them in her heart-
Jesus wept-
openly on the cross
in full view of her.

This poem is a more realistic and historically accurate version of what the nativity story was really like. As such it diverges substantially from the accounts of Luke and Mark found in the New Testament.

For some God comes in silence
and for others it’s a saxophone solo.

He’s the confession a lonely parish priest
has waited all day to see and hear

after lattice hours of watching
smoke blow down
like Cain’s rejected offering.

Every soul has two Popes,
both living in God
but are not of it.

One preserves the past,
the other walks hope’s path.

The force is another Jedi mind trick
that convinces the soul that all
that is Sith is not necessarily sin
but the whining of a baby Yoda
aware of his Death Star.