Dear Cancer

It is time for you to go. Away. From this place, the jaundiced remnants of my father’s body. I am kicking you out of the kidneys, please, leave the liver, evicting you from the esophagus, and foreclosing the frontal cortex. Because you are black and gray, and purple poison, and there is no room for you here, where the currents of blood that roar like Viking vessels are red. Red like sunspots in an old picture of a mountain valley in mist, red like a cherry Mustang from 1972 running, harder, hotter, faster than can be caught, red like the stripes of the American flag, enslaved by you no longer. But. Like a bad tenant, cancer refuses to listen. Kevin Spacey in Pacific Heights, mosquitos, acne on a teenager, it just won’t go away. Waiting for a permit, a lawsuit, but these courts haven’t been established yet. Which is to say Laws don’t limit blood flow, illegal growth, the Cure Constitution doesn’t have enough signatures, or maybe enough hours, despite the people who work tens of thousands of hours. . . . ten thousand hours, the time it takes to become a master at something, ten thousand hours, too short to master, or muster, miracles. I don’t know why I wrote this letter to cancer. Illiterate, ignorant, and ugly, It can’t open letters, doesn’t check its mail, can’t call me back, can’t cooperate, can’t care, can’t do much but kill. Maybe I was lonely. One less person in the world to talk to. Seven billion others still here, maybe I shouldn’t be lonely. But this poem has been too much about me, and about cancer, and not enough about him. But, I can’t talk about him in public, lest I make all of you uncomfortable, can’t talk about him at home lest my family cry our lungs to collapse, or die of drastic dehydration, so I don’t talk about him. But silence strangles like sickness, builds in the back of the throat every time I take a walk in the park and see a little girl on her father’s shoulders, or dream about a cure that saved a man who smiled at me, and then I wake up looking for him. I wrote this poem because there are things I have to say lest I suffocate on my silence. I wanna say that I remember. That is, I am trying to, but, it comes back in pieces like my memory shattered on impact. He never crashed, though. He drove fast and skied faster, he wrestled his way, first out of arm-holds in a high school gymnasium, then out of the arms of everyone telling him ‘no’. On an open road, a white slope, in a laughing contest, no one could catch him. Cancer never caught him, either, as his eyes and skin turned yellow, like sports cars, like wasps, like bone……. he just had to find a different way to run.