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Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Three years: Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.


Yesterday marked three years since I was told I had cancer.

Thoughts and words borrowed from many references, and I thank you for them.

1

Other than those two roads diverging in the yellow wood
one leading one way, the other another 
I don't believe in judgement day 
with the heavenly armed forces
pulling you up or pushing you down.

Other than those roads in the yellow wood-
what paths are before us?
It's the same woods and the same earth, the same
fiber holding it all together- those tiny atoms pulling and pushing
for or against, that gravity
of an eon echo burst that cast us out sideways
from hydrogen into
whatever we are.

It’s just legroom we scuffle about in
existence is so fragile:
temperature and speed all just so,
any more or less and we’d still be the unadorned element
H
Space is a precarious place.
There are stars burning who’s light won’t reach earth before I die.
The sun may have just exploded, just now
and in 8 minutes and 20 seconds
everything will change.
and yet somehow,
stay exactly the same
trivial, a clump of atoms inside a Red Giant and
burning until there's nothing left but void. 

It's all the same woods.
And we won’t know what’s beyond these trees
till we get there.

2

Shuffles and shambles to survive, while I 
struggle to figure out 
what that means anymore. Is it
carrying my bones to and from my bed? Is it
the space between griefs? Is it
holding a chive blossom in my hand?
Watching the sparrows fight at the feeder?
Pouring coffee?

Some days it’s too much, it's too much of
just crushing these goddamned osteo-lugnuts
rusted shut, full of shit made
in a factory somewhere

I lie half awake
Panic is my predator and she has her way with me.
I am food for Dangerous, Despondency, Despair
I have nowhere to hide
No more good face, no more God face
no more comfort that this will actually turn out okay
as I watch on like a horror film:
"Don’t go up to the attic. DON'T GO UP TO—"
But she goes anyway. See, the script is written this way
because the bard say
“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances”
But it’s the exits,
it’s the exits that are final.

3
The basil's spicy scent still on my
hands
and the marigold petals will begin
to light up our summer salads.
I’m peering like a four year old,
peeking fingers through the fence,
waiting for the beets to sprout, as they should
while I look on
They whisper, "Nothing doing. I don't belong to you.
I am not your play thing. I am the great earth."

Majesty is happening under ground, and
I have to praise that.
I must give thanks unto
the worms, the feeders in the dark
who quietly, discreetly, till the soil and nourish
while nearby seeds also quietly, discreetly, creep out of their casing
and push with noiseless childbearing cries and
bear down into deep roots, reach arms up in love to the sun
To the bees committing their altruistic ritual:
"Serve the world, serve the world."
I must give praise to these little ones,
inside my doubt, inside despair
Inside the death and death and death of cells
Inside cancer, hunger, murder and space
the unending explosions of atoms: 
Praise.
To the mustard, the broccoli sprout,
the fruits of the great earth.



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