Drinking From the Cancer Cup

Despair is great, and only humour noir helps to overcome it.
         —André Breton

I. Give & Take of Beauty: I'm Given the Words

I am drinking from the cancer cup with my lips
and the lips of those who have suffered before me

all of us drinking from the BIG cancer cup
a larger suffering, these older voices, these other souls

speaking through my heart, speaking directly to yours
of energies that turn us again to earth and fertility

There's deeper tissue here than I've yet laid bare
I would feel a sharp object in my abdomen

cutting gently and with an aim at laying open
not reasoning out the unreasonable reality of death

Enter my cells through the immense, gaping door
of my perspective, welcome to the innards of my sex

Here is a doorknob, here is a broom
Take the broom and sweep aside the artifices

Come inward, a geography trip
to my heart, my dick and balls

and my prostate


II. Vanity of the Prostate

I am Prostate

I'm a gland, a secretor of fluid
the size of a walnut, just below the bladder

I propel the semen through the urethra
a lubricator of soul, I'm the oil pump of the sex act

I am the second major cause of death in men
I am when I metastasize

I enter your seminal vesicles, your bladder, your sphincter
your lymph nodes, your spinal column, your bones

cells run amuck


III. Painpoint on a Scale of One to Ten

easy to say pain is just pain
like a jagged blade

easy to say pain passes
like night

easy to say pain is a point of view
when you're comfortable


IV. Wishing It Were Different

Allopathic treatments are radical prostatectomy
& brachytherapy, tiny radioactive seeds implanated

Possible side effects are urethral stricture, bleeding,
pulmonary embolism, incontinence, erectile dysfunction

e.d., a side effect of prostate surgery & brachytherapy
but, then, it's hard to get a hard-on when you're dead


V. Light Expanding on Light

biopsy reveals
a tumor

staged at T2, Gleason score of VI/X and psa of 6.3
protocol of cellar forte, grapeseed phytosome

breast basics, beta plex, cyto-redoxin, green tea
zinc, Eskimo oil and sun-ripened tomatoes

sulfur-containing amino acids from animal proteins
lower blood pH suppressing production of 1,25(OH)2D

I'm ok with my death, makes me a gentler lover
not ramming my hardness into you

touching your hair, touching your skin, rubbing noses
kissing your eyes, being with you, really seeing you

holding heaven's qi
using garuda sparks to grapple with the nagas

"swiping the slate clean
to live and work afresh"

the worms bury us

life is nothing if not invasive


VI. Emptiness Beyond Within

hit below the belt, a gut reaction
do this, do that, do nothing

seed implantation—no worse than a kick in the butt with a steel tipped boot,
learned to get about with a catheter and a bag of bloody piss strapped to my
leg, more of a nuisance than anything, passed a radioactive seed, but they
gave me a lead container to keep it in, feeling like a nuclear scientist,
removing the seed from the screen with a pair of tweezers

glowing for a couple of month
the manual says I can greet a pregnant woman
but then should stay six feet away
no bouncing babies on my knee

I breathe in the bad, breathe out the good
I'm breathing still