I Have Now Met Death

I have now met death six times by my count in 28 years.

First, while still in the womb,
my mother, sweating with fever
that climbed from the dry cradle inside her
through the vein that fed me,
to the arteries into her body,
and threatened to engulf us both.

Second, cowering under a car,
face ground into the oil stained cement,
chassis digging into my back,
as men threw their bodies at each other
in the name of pride.
We were so scared, Carina and I,
that one of them would realize there were two
little girls listening to them beat each other around us.

Third, as a child, feeling for the first time
the sting of rejection of a body of peers
who turned crayons into scalpels
and words into knives--
who shamed me for the first time
and brought me into the knowledge
that body image is a thing, and fat shaming is a power
more strong than the cells in my brain,
or the sweetness of my heart.
I twisted the two ends of a beach towel,

head in the loop
until my face turned candy red, then purple,
and my mother happened upon me,
and I turned and mouthed: "Look, Mommy,"
then let go and cried.

The fourth, I was 18, and stupidly, ignorantly
let a man rip out my heart.
I think I've always been a little stunted because of that,
like a tree with two limbs, where there clearly should be three.
Luckily, I had been indoctrinated enough
to think suicide was a sin,
so I tried to find someone to kill me in the
dangerous backwoods of sweet, sleepy Brunswick, Maine.
It was my saving grace.  Thank...God.
The only thing that shocks me now,
is how little I feel for a man who once meant so much to me.

The fifth was when I was 20
and drank myself so deep into the bottle
I almost never came out again,

because I realized I had spent my whole life
training for an unattainable dream.

That night my poor room mate sat with me
head by my chest, praying I'd breathe just one more time.

The sixth, was when the chemo they said
was my only hope for survival--the one that
doesn't have strong side effects on the majority of patients--
nearly killed me, nearly wrung me dry
like a water skin in a parched man's hands

so I can confidently say that I am
less so afraid of dying
more so simply not quite sated with living,
not because death is not permanent
or terrifying
or unknown
but because I am 28

and yes, that is a lot younger than many
but it is not younger than most.
This is true throughout history,
this is true, even in my own city,
my country, my world,
people more deserving than me
and less deserving than me--

people who haven't lived long enough to deserve anything--
are dying--and that is just time.

And it brings me a sense of balance,
if not a sense of peace or complete freedom from disquiet,
that I am no more special than any other being
to have walked this earth,
that the mutation inside of me is a part of nature's law to evolve
and that I am just a dot on a parabola that shifts
with the demands of an evolutionary process we have defied.
Who am I to escape what others have not,
who am I to be spared the terrors of
the plagues, the droughts, the wars,
to have been born in my time and my circumstance?
Had I any choice or any power that

I be spared those sufferings
and the sufferings to come as surely as our sun shines?
I would count myself blessed.
So Death, come, kiss me, and take me, or not.
I do not fear your coming,
but if I have any say,
I would like to drink a while longer

while we sit together.

A King's Thoughts (for my friend, Larry)

There are days when I forget I have cancer,
when I forget the crippling power
of the unknown variables freed from the shroud of ignorance,
and begin to move forward,
days when I forget that my best laid plans
are nothing but chaff spilled from a child's hands
awaiting the next strong gust,
days when the competitive edge in me gnaws
at my restraints, ears flicking at the passage of time,
straining to be released.
And then there are days like this:
to hear your cancer has resurfaced,
after what you have done, in spite of the statistic
one percent survival--
to hear a man so full of love and laughter,
kindness, gentleness,
an embrace sure as a stallion's neck,
has not slipped the bridle of this cursed disease.
This is how the early rulers
must have felt looking over the plains
sprawled out before their kingdoms,
at the glowing dots of beacon fires
lighting one, by one, slowly, each brighter than the last,
the time lapse between each flame reducing,
and then all at once, the mountainside
bursting aflame, leading straight to the gates,
the last a scorching inferno exploding
in oil and dry kindling,
bearing the news that an ally,
after much battle,
is near overrun
and calls for aid.
It must have still'd even the bravest heart,
to know even as one has prepared,
stored, trained, envisioned--
even as one strived to break free the divination,
that even as one's fallow land has,
after much transudation and lamentation,
ripened with burgeoning wheat,
another's nation is smoldering under the razing of its land.
They must have looked upon
labor of their fields,
upon the stones of their fortitudes,
doubled the guard,
donned their armor,
steeled the fear piercing their viscera,
while praying that the plea was not
an omen.

To Believe in God: the Christian Chapter

To believe in God is audacious and impudent. 
It is a purposeful, conscious decision to live in blindness.  
Furthermore,
for a human to believe that his God 
is the right God and the only God 
is to embrace bigotry and intolerance
and to revel in elitism shrouded in false humility.
For the idea of God is war with humanity.

Alexander

Brother of my soul,
you are the sweetest of us, the gentlest,
the strongest and the kindest.
I thank the fates that brought us together,
speaking secrets in the dark between sips of petrichor.
It pains me to write this for you.

We've never been one for words--
only actions--it is the force that drives our bones.
And when we can no longer mend with science, or time, or love
we close our eyes and open our arms to embrace inevitability,
and can feel nothing at all,
and everything all at once.
It is our nature.
It is Nature.

Today we breached the inevitability of life,
not lessened by foreknowledge.
It's a bitter syzygy, the truth that as the son reaches his zenith,
his senior must descend.
All I could do for you was hold on to the thin
invisible thread of anguish connecting across thousands of miles,
as you wept in your car, uttering the words across the salty deltas of your face,
words your father spoke to you about your wedding day,  "I'll be there either way,"
and remember when I once cried similarly,
clinging to your voice on the other side of this country telling me to
"Breathe, Lydia, breathe."

You can't die.
Please don't die.
I'm not ready yet.
I will never be ready.
How many children have pleaded with parents
for the one thing that cannot be given?
And how many parents have said
to the child--"That won't be for a long while."
and then to the teen--"We all die one day."
and to the man--"That's not up to me?"

Oh, my brother,
I want to crawl through the phone lines
to you and hold you--but I can't.
I want to lie to you and tell you,
that it will all be okay--but I won't.
The only thing I can do
is to exist with you in silence
driving out into the night, in the twisting
dipping, heaving paths between the moss covered pines.
Hurtling through time, up the contours of our lives,
hoping the next turn holds anything but devastation--
none can slow time--
peering out through the glass as the
night engulfs us in sonder.

Being Brave

What does it mean to be brave?

Is it the steel of nerve, 

the calm of the knight as his squire straps on his armor?

The breath whooshing out 

as the swimmer takes her mark?

Perhaps it is going to take a board exam

even if you never feel ready,

or taking the blow from a man 

three times your size and standing up again.

But tomorrow it is none of those things--

it is not war paint, or chants, 

great speeches, or montages. 

There will be no shaky fingers, or quivering lips, no rapid breaths or anticipation, or rising swell of courage

and will that breaks into a howl of bloodlust. 

There is no fighting, 

no kicking of ass.  No.  

I have fought this fight before,

and I know there is no winning.

Tomorrow will come punishing floods,

Unforgiving and unrelenting, 

pouring into my body and into my bones.

And even with my best preparation 

it will pound and tear through me until 

I lay limp, 

my being shaken out of me 

like flour through a sieve.

I know this, as I lay down tonight,

and I will rise to meet it,

to survive it in the morning.

March 30, 2013

What it feels like to live with cyclothymia--to be read aloud

I know it’s here.  I do not know from where it came though we have met before once.  That time it cut out my heart and left me for dead.  It did not know my secret.  (I do not need my heart to live.)  Now I am older so I know it is here.  It already flooded my world up to my waist.  It climbs quickly, silently, disguised as other things--school, work, seasonal affective disorder.  If I could just work harder, work faster--but I can't, there's smoke pouring from my brain, singing my eyebrows.  I push my hands out and feel them sink into the ooze.  It carries me—suspended—there is no surface.  That burn up my nostrils into my mind, down my throat into my chest.  I am there forever.  I will lose consciousness soon.  I don’t know why but I brace my hands on my knees and begin to cry.

And then it’s gone and all I know in the end is that I've wrestled with something primitive and primordial and I did not lose though I did not win.  It’s not so impressive in the light.  We laying there, me and this thing that is older than time itself, exhausted, bruised, bloodied, covered in the muck and mire and shit of the night, helplessly bare in the gray morning, painfully gulping thin air.  I do not know its name or its face—it is always changing. 

We look at the handprints on each other's necks, hating each other, but without enough strength to do anything--not even to glare--knowing at the same time that it's the most intimate interaction we've ever had.  I close my eyes to rest and then remember it’s still there so I open them again, slowly, as if the very motion of opening my eyelids is in itself a lover's recognition, a salute to a worthy opponent.  The beast knows this, and it needs reprieve too, so it gathers itself, like tar reverse flowing back into the abyss of my being, taking with it every disgusting, perverse, mutated part of my world.  My face, my neck, the insides of my ears are raw and burning from the salty delta that overflowed from inside my skull.  I am too tired to clean myself so I lay there, miserable, in the nowhere in-between state. 

Sleep comes, stealing inside of me while I lay there too weak to fight.  The siren is silent.  There is no one left to sound it.  And sleep smiles at me, a smile that says she loves me more than anyone else, so even though I find her repulsive (that cloying, annoying, persistent, pathetically dull wench that I normally deflect), I close my eyes and let her touch me.  She is second best.  She will never awe and set my mind on fire, but she is there.  She is persistent.  She is consistent.  She is gentle. She takes off my armor, kisses my wounds, and feeds me numbing draft.  “Numbing draft?” I think, “Silly girl.  I cannot find my feelings.”  “I know,” she says, “I know.”  Unthanked wench.  I owe her.  More than that, I need her.  I know she will keep me safe, so I let her kiss me.  I let her cover me with her body, and as she draws her arms close around my shoulders I wrap myself in the comforting knowledge that I am still alive and I will stay alive till the next time we meet and make fierce battle again.

Phuong

If you ever have to choose between
saving the world or saving me,
save the world.

It is winter 2007, and the dorm is quiet
as we lay in bed in that transient hour
when the college has ground to a stop,
for one precious hour before the gears churn again,
like a coal train engine in the yard, groaning
to a halt with steam mingling with the mist.
It is the only time we have for each other
when philosophy and esoteric percolations
bubble up from the depths of muddled academia.
Time to think, when our brains have finally
stopped gasping for time, and we can think
about if we can live with our lives--

If we are still becoming the people we hoped to.
We are lucky to have this hour while
the halls are split by gashes of light under
doors and spilling around curtains by scattered students
frantically toiling into the night.

Uh huh, she says, half-asleep, tucked under my arm.

And if you have to choose between
saving you or saving me,
save yourself.
I know it's a little macabre, but just in case
I want you to know,
this is what I want you to do--
I don't want to die, but I am ready--
you're not.  I've got God.  I'm saved.  You're not.
Does that make sense?

Yeah.  It does, she says, slightly more awake.

I wish you knew God--

Babe, no offense, but, I've seen
how you've struggled with your god,
and I never want to know him.
I can't understand why your god would let
the things that have happened to you, happen to you.
Does that make sense?

Yeah.  It does, I say.

It is summer 2015, and the execution date is set.
I lay next to her, listening to her gently snore.
I am different now, older, slower,
living without that borderline mania
that forced me to attack all things in life with rabid ferocity
until I collapsed--
And I have completely--
now I simply shuffle
from battle to battle.
My limbs betray me--
they shake with fatigue--
My mind is not as quick or sharp,
although its depth has increased.
And my heart, my heart races with disease,
instead of the strong, slow, steady beat of youth.

I say softly, nose against nose,
When I am gone, save yourself.