I held my poison words

with my forked tongue.

Bit back those daggers

my teeth, a hundred white stallions.

My lips curled

a heaving tidal wave;

but heavy my jaw weighed,

a solid steel levee.

Memories staked deep,

best kept chained and unreleased.

Tumor, you spread inside me;

encasing, enveloping, engulfing.

Disease, you overtake me;

devouring, defiling, destroying.

Crippled bones, stiff and twisted.

My body, a rotting tree

struck down, bedridden.

A jilted shadow tricked into the sunlight;

burned and writhing,

melted and sliding.

Waiting for midnight

quarter past, half past

countdown supplication

too fast, exhale, suffocation.

Cancer, you eat me alive;

thirsting, thrashing, thorning.

You kept me in the dark,

pushed back like a silhouette.

Lights off, lights out

because no one can see tomorrow

like the blind man with a garbage bag of sorrow.

And I’ve got no beginnings to these nerve endings.

And I keep no gloves in this glove box.

But I held out, withheld, out held

pushing on into the dawn;

Isolated and forlorn,

languished and worn.

This deathbed fit for two,

“You. It was you.”