Fealty (Sick)

I’m sorry, David. The tests are in. We’ve done all the bloodwork. Studied, collected, microscoped, analyzed, cultured every last specimen we could jar & hold.  We’ve telestratored an 80-inch LED, consulted with the very best: face-to-face, over the phone, text, Skype, Gchat, Facebook wall posts and private messages. You can click through the two thousand, nine hundred fifty-seven page Power Point presentation conversation. We’ve seen it all.

David, your cancer is no longer in remission.

The cellular infantry, so remarkably steadfast & intent in previous years, smelled fraud, turned tail & ran. The ribbon tying, binding, hoping to weld your heart together out of sheer gall is failing. Your blood is bloated sludge. Your atrophied lungs ripple tenderly, shaking the dust around with every inhale, exhaling impotent & inert cobweb geysers up into trachea, rendering every breath a chore, a tax on existence–itself initially unwilled, shot out into the world. Now, fumbling. Now chosen implicitly, only out of habit. Resented. Rueful. Enslaved. Decision making relegated to droning Xeroxes. To bend a micrometer, your knees crackle, snap & pop like a roaring summer fire cackles. And burns a few hairs more.

Weary. Your feet. Your poor feet. The plight of pawns, yes. The hallowed horse’s hoof. Calloused malignants. The inadequate footwear you so often chose for mountain life–oh! The boots you never wore in winter.  Bubbled over blisters. Eternally vacant nail beds. Crusted over scars eternally wincing. The coral seabeds you insisted on dragging soles across. Her’s too. She wasn’t accustomed to such sadomasochism.

Lot of good any of this did. Not paying attention to footwear. Or jackets & pants. The weeping the skin does. You know.

Aloof.

No. It’s no surprise this cancer won’t even be the thing to kill you. You’re a glutton. And gluttons have endurance. Fail safes to back-ups to rendezvous’ known to fall through. Disease has returned. Snow is falling, but not softly like the short halcyon winters of youth, lasting an afternoon til after finishing word problems, releasing out into

sun & fresh wind, an unfurled kite asserting a throne; Simba returned to Pride Rock & all that. Everywhere, the sky is filled with descending, indiscriminating grand pianos. Brusque, cold bureaucrats signing off on your forthcoming death.

David, it’s spread to your brain, blood, nodes, bones & into the deepest, most originary, truly fertile & strawberry caves in the heart.

Your cancer has returned. You have stage four, advanced, recurrent & metastatic cowardice. Rupture out. Embrace flux or embrace nihilism. Transcend. Or falter & wilt, through & through, never free enough to keel over, dump the flooding water & accept the necessary casualties of friendly but failed ideas.

Repledge fealty. Use your feet. Not your lips.