As the name suggests, it’s the job of the patient to demonstrate patience. And so I passed nine days of torturous waiting. Finally the surgeon phoned with the results of the biopsy. I had what he called “an oddball cancer.” Of course, I did. What other kind would a poet have? Worms crawled up my nose and out the corners of my eyes. I couldn’t tell whether I was sinking on my own or being pulled down into darkness. There was once a time I actually believed that the materials expelled by exploding stars were the very same materials that compose us.
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The surgeon stood on the other side of the room, about as far from where I sat on the exam table as he could get, his arms folded protectively across his chest. He was explaining how this particular type of cancer spreads via the bloodstream, causing murder and mayhem along the way. I hadn’t the medical vocabulary to question him or object. I just listened in glum silence. There wasn’t even a window for me to look out. It was spring, but the plants were still all underground. And now death had my shaped face.
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It’s a different world than I grew up in. Strange new diseases have appeared. The weather operates without regard to the seasons. Store shelves are often empty, as though we’re living in Murmansk in Soviet era Russia. Other people carry pills for ballast. I take shelter under the overhang of sleep and in slim books by fat, bearded poets. As for the strength to endure the rest – political rot, a shallow cell phone culture, the Judas kiss of cancer – it can’t be taught. It can only be learned.
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I was somewhere else in my head when I pulled up to the drive-thru window. By then I had been diagnosed as one of only 24,000 cases of liposarcoma in the U.S. a year. A heavy-set woman in a World War II-style overseas cap peered out at me. I handed her a ten and she handed me a box of donuts. “Have a nice day, Hon,” she said with a smile that exposed a dark gap where a couple of her bottom teeth should have been. I felt a weird kind of kinship, like we were mutineers who had been marooned on a remote desert island together. The sun was in my eyes the whole way home.
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They’ll mark with permanent ink – in effect, tattoo – the exact area to be irradiated. I visualize it being a kind of connect-the-dots drawing of the moon face of a murderer. After the first week or two of treatment, I can expect to feel embittered. I’m already subject to grisly thoughts, ripples of loneliness, confused dreams. Although I continue to try, I can no longer locate the universal in the particular or the still, small voice of conscience amid the roaring in my head. Healthy people avoid me as if afraid of catching cancer. My own doctor looks away when he talks to me. Only the dead, apparently, are prepared to take me in.
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Everything has changed, and nothing has. It still rains when the forecast says it won’t. Hummingbirds still come to the oriole feeder. The angel of history still hosts orgies of torture and murder. Doors still open from both sides. The abandoned buildings of defunct chain restaurants are still being converted into churches. My wife still dresses in Bohemian chic, a tattered czarina. A disfiguring scar still snakes across the back of my shoulder where the cancer took root. I still put drops in my eyes first thing in the morning as if there’s an afterwards I still have a chance of seeing.
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I feel like a squatter in my own body, living, if you can call it that, in a derelict building slated for demolition. It’s a feeling I’m almost too ashamed to admit to having. Expressing it seems even to me a pathetic attempt to elicit sympathy. Over the past month, the anguish of discovering that I have cancer has been amplified by a second discovery – very few people actually care. Only a tiny number have called or texted me. Where’s my support from relatives and friends? Where? I’m like a sailor trapped on a broken submarine, miles underwater and almost out of breathable air, banging desperately on the pipes in the mistaken belief that searchers are up there listening.
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There’s a slow hissing sound, like air being let out of a balloon, but it’s the heart that’s deflating. I think of the whitewashed room with a view of fields and woods where Simone Weil starved herself to death in a conscious effort to go quietly to God. My own consciousness is acquiring a more militant cast, as if cancer can impart a perverse kind of courage, an unfailing will to tell the truth, however indecent.
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I’m still in my twenties. A round-heeled woman at the bar grabs me by the arm and asks for my help. But I also would rather do the tying than be the one tied up. Faraway in time, I’m on WebMD reading about the survival rate of sarcoma patients. My head feels like a crumpled ball of paper. You can stare into the dark for only so long before the dark begins staring back. Now the woman is singing along with the song on the jukebox in a low, whispery voice, the sound of bees working the flowers.
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The other night I was about halfway through a spy thriller on Netflix before I realized I had seen it already. What a feeble old man I’ve become, teary, forgetful, a futile stick figure. It’s only force of habit that keeps me turning up in the usual places. No one in their right mind would ask my advice under current circumstances, but if someone for some reason did, I would tell them there are two words you don’t ever want to hear uttered in the same breath, rare and fatal.
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I call myself a poet. Writing is my daily ritual. It arrests the flow of time while I’m doing it and keeps my congenital sadness temporarily at bay. For years, I’ve inhabited the role of poet as if it were a suit made of a miraculous material, like a superhero’s costume, fireproof, bulletproof, death proof. It’s only since my cancer diagnosis that I’ve realized the extent of my mistake and the effort I put into maintaining it. All of us alive now are dying. Some of us are dying more painfully or obviously than others, but we’re all moving along the same somber trajectory. Come morning I’ll pour myself a cup of black coffee, the more bitter, the better. I’ll open my laptop. I’ll move my fingers over the keyboard. I’ll be one more poet the world in its hurry ignores.
***
About The Author:
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the winner of the 2019 Grey Book Press Chapbook Competition for What It Is and How to Use It, the 2017 Lorien Poetry Prize from Thoughtcrime Press for The Loser's Guide to Street Fighting, and the 2015 Press Americana Prize for Poetry for Dangerous Acts Starring Unstable Elements. He co-edits the journals UnLost and Unbroken.
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