Never Think They Can’t

It’s pretty awful for you
And worse for many others,
But acknowledgement never

Feels much like consolation.
Moments when your hurts recede
In friendship or kind weathers,

When the body feels pleasant
For a person to be in,
Possibly even well-loved,

Those are the consolations,
And fine food or holy sense
Of wonder their filigree.

The great consolation is
That consolations can be.

Cancer Dancing

Is there any way
In which they may be
Enjoying themselves?

Multicellular
Organisms have
Fun all kinds of ways,

But at the level
Of cells? Of rogue cells?
The way they carry

On jousting, evolving,
Racing each other,
Dodging all the ways

Death comes after them,
The body’s patrols,
The surgeon’s scalpel,

The chemical bombs,
The radiation
Punching holes in them,

Still partying on,
Finding new places
To land and invade,

There must be a kind
Of joy to it all,
The small lives lived large.

To the Inhuman Gods

There’s no mythology,
Not of one or many
Deities, where the gods

Just keep it to themselves—
Where they mind their business,
The wise and the jealous,

The mother and father,
Creator, destroyer,
Even the messengers.

They’re huge, they’re immortal,
Powerful, beautiful—
They’re righteous, they’re rascals,

They’re shapeshifters, shapeless,
And wholly abstracted,
But they don’t interact

On any occasion
With humans or human
Fates. Those gods don’t get myths.

If You Mean to Visit the Misty Marsh Woods

Here, let’s build a small gap in the wall.
It’s alright that it’s an indoor wall.
Nearly everyone lives in cities,

If not in suburbs like frogspawn, now.
Real garden walls are for public parks
Or for the privately frightened rich.

Any interior wall will do,
So long as you don’t punch all the way
Through to neighbors or your other room.

What’s the point of a gap in a wall
If it isn’t even a portal?
Well, that’s exactly the point. Portals

Go all the way through, either to more
Ordinary world, like any door,
Or into nothing, except in tales.

The number of tales about portals
Has grown so great it’s unbearable.
Just create a small gap in the wall.

Kneel or sit and stick your head in it.
Now you are properly in the wilds.
Whatever’s going on in your head

Is as much alternative cosmos
As you get. In such a position,
What wildness can memories project?

How Much Illness Counts as an Emergency?

You can go. You can come back.
You could try to carry on
Another night, one more night,

And then in the morning, if
You’re still home in the morning,
You can face the same choices,

The same questions—how badly
Do you hurt, are you impaired,
Do you think the pain will grow,

If you don’t get help? No one
Wants to play the pincushion
In a windowless white room

While tests are ordered, taken,
Considered and debated.
If lucky you’d get released

With a clear and unscary
New diagnosis, sent home,
Possibly with painkillers.

If unlucky you must stay,
Admitted and maybe wheeled
Into hours of surgery

From which you may never or
Never fully recover.
You need to make up your mind,

Even though you’re pretty sure
Biochemicals, weather,
Discomfort, ephemera,

Possibly even your genes
Or your resident microbes
Are deciding this for you.

You can go. You can come back.
You could try to carry on
Another night, one more night.