Familiar Ghosts

I can’t sleep.

Those I lost,

Those I will lose,

Come to me,

For company,

Or to confuse.

My eyes, swollen with sick

And love,

Cannot shut;

And I keep thinking,

If…But…

Visions from the past

Haunt me,

Like drapes in the wind.

I smile to see

Familiar ghosts

Wait,

In some dust;

And I must know

Insomnia and fear

Are ghosts, too.

Dancer

I searched for a word
to rhyme with cancer,
and all i could think of
was the word ‘dancer’.

i just wrote a poem –
just yesterday –
of the hope i put to god,
to let her be okay.

but he doesnt exist,
so it was a fucked up hope;
cancer asks to dance again,
it widened its scope –

it danced with mom last year,
and now forces my pet,
i cant dare to pray,
it may not be done yet.

It may be God
spreading his fingers,
to catch any last hope
that perchance lingers;

but worry not,
there is none left;
you did your job well,
and now i am bereft,

of hope, of faith,
of all that i knew,
so instead of god,
i’ll just dance with you.

Chemotherapy

Birds outside this room
Fly so completely free –
Oh, what do they know
Of chemotherapy?
They are part of Nature –
Which is just fire and ice –
With no manmade notions
Of virtue or of vice –
So ignorant they fly –
I wish I could too –
With no view of life
And of death no clue.