cancerpoetry

#MightyPoets
#Cancer here’s a poem I wrote thinking about my body after I die from #MetastaticBreastCancer
On Fire
Bury me amongst the trees
Where redwoods overlook the sea
From atop a crossed mountain
Where my body will quicken
From flesh into sand.
Beneath the needle-bed’s
Blanket, the fibers of my hair weave
A way through the wind-filled leaves.
Heat my voice with borrowed sun
What once kissed my cheeks
Where my freckles reached to meet.
You now hear my broken chords
Faintly in the the distance unmoored
Lapping at the salted shore.
Safely clean I lay down on a million fine grains of sand
Never feeling myself again I repeat
To anyone: I am an empty vessel.
I’ll still wake every morning,
Habitually my hands still asleep
Parting the fitted sheets aways,
Long gone I still reach after you.
I am the water, then the dew
Maturing into a pinguid mist.
The palms clap and sway to
Conduct the band at noon
To play a song of our bequest.
The hour’s imminent.
Time to ride a wicked dream on
A silk weaved carpet twisted
With last night’s ghostly breath.
Come take inventory of my remains
Should the tree mark me no more.

The lumber that’s become of me
Taken over by the shore. I am a house
Now - a shelter for a family to whom you
Lost me once again. My soul holds up
The walls now, my legs hammered
Into floorboards, arms encircle
Every bedroom where the dormers rest.
My fingers lace together to build
A painted white front porch,
That’s my hips now a swing
I hang there, under the eaves.
Look up to see my head holds high
A roof; my back’s now the front door
My eyes frame the windows, my heart beats
From the kitchen.

My birds left the
Forest knowing where my mouth now sings
And the woodpecker that lived inside my trunk
Hollowed out my attic in the spring.
Let me stand strong and steady
For at least a hundred years.
By then, long gone, you built your own.
And our lives live on, unworldly yet eternally.

Looking down at the rubble of what’s
Left of my body in the demolition heap.
What at all might grow from me who once
You buried underneath a tree?
Let me now burn someone’s hands
A lit fire from my plight.
It’s cold outside where I once stood
In the trees and dark of night
Where I’ll burn vast and luminous
My spirit gives newborn light.