#713: A Poem
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Remember: I Am Two ThingsI know why you look like that
with your brows pressed down over your eyelids
in that cascade of soft flesh made hard.
The cancer is inside me,
but I cannot feel it soaking into my organs in the dark
like you imagine I must.
Your face does that
because you imagine the tumor erasing me,
fading me out into a hairless wisp,
me and my body as one thing taking leave of you.
But I do not feel those fabled fingers gripping my soft tissues;
my body is an ornament around the brain I inhabit.
You see one thing that could leave you;
I see one thing that was never mine
strung around myself, heavy and wet.
If this body must be food,
you would lose two things, I would lose one, and
this fleshly sack would miss nothing.
(also posted at Schmoetry)
Labels: the poetry
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17 comments:
All I can say is WOW! You are able to create a picture with words so that I can literally see what you are writing about. I envy that.
I keep reading and reading that one. I cannot get over the straight forward simple beautiful truth in your words. Very wow, indeed.
Schmutzie, this is an incredible poem. I know I am supposed to treat the narrator as a narrator and not as you, but knowing what you are going through, I want to take this moment to tell you how touched I am by this piece and how much I have been thinking of you since you made your announcement about having cancer. I haven’t been commenting, but I have been reading. Thank you for sharing this today.
This piece felt so very personal, yet I could also feel myself in it.
Thanks so much for sharing it with us.
I bet if John Mayer sang "Your Body is an Ornament," he'd be freaking out some of his fans.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I'd like to see Sufjan Stevens singing Schmutzie's poetry.
"but I cannot feel it soaking into my organs in the dark
like you imagine I must." I do think that. Beautiful way of saying the unspeakable .. post a comment ~ Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom] ~ main page
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