Edwin Hubble saw certain clusters of stars;
He showed that these particular clusters are other galaxies.
Not just specks of sand on the same relatively close spars,
But sands on vastly far spars of vastly distant spatial seas,
Startling with the truth of what they are;
Though now familiarity has lulled so many into sleeping.
Dull acceptance, as of banalities, of shocking realities.
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Raisins in bread,
And how they spread--
As the baking bread expands--became the model of our universe;
Stars and local clusters of stars and galaxies of stars
Streaming off in all directions at accelerating speeds.
Clusters of raisins, cosmic raisins, of untold, untapped power:
Making mere moments of millenia, and mocking humanity's little hour.
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"Make love, not war"--the sign above my bedroom door.
I was a pacifist, and a great lover of women.
In the golden dream of life, in the brief time before I was to be buried.
Several women, as the years passed, with great passion and pleasure;
Touched with true love as the topmost treasure.
And there was a sweet twinkling trace of time, seven years,
That I was graced to be married.
Divorce, like a bitter death before death, broke apart those days;
Yet, as the pain somewhat subsided, there still abided memories.
Memories of love, of passion.  Two years of mourning my marriage;
Then back to the loving embrace of feminine grace and honeyed fire.
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Everything in my life was touched by poetry.
Above all, I love the lyrical and beautiful in life--
Light, interweaving with night,
Laced with love and fear, in life's flowerful, fierce flight.
Cacophony and symphony, interwoven into euphony:
Life made music by the magic of the poetic mind.
Ovid and Sappho sang the pulse-beats of my own life's blood;
Solomon sang the passion of my heart; Shelley sang my soul's yearning.
Solomon poetically wooed in words, something like these:
"Thy stature is like the stature of a tall tree.
Thy two breasts are like clusters of grapes.
I have said: Let me climb the tree,
That I may take hold of its clusters of grapes."
Shelley wistfully worded love: "Nothing in the world is single."
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With my memories, in my heart I am not single.  Though I am lonely;
With no lover now with whom to mingle; and even my friend,
My very best friend, whom I loved and still love,
More than my own life; and my grieved heart loves him, and always will,
Above all relatives and friends,
Even above all lovers, above all hopes and dreams--
Brian, brother of my soul, friend of my heart--
My friend has come to his end.
Too soon, far too soon, toward where my life, also too soon, wends.
Now I often feel friendless and I am loverless, because of cancer.
Cancer has crippled my lovemaking power;
Though partly surgically restored, I can find no woman truly to love me;
My cancer keeps long-term relationships and chances of true love away;
And, with a big push from a cruel hospital emergency room doctor,
Cancer has killed my friend.
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Shakespeare sang the truth and integrity of my love, when he penned:
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.  Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove."
Everyone I ever loved and cared about, I still love and care about;
Including my ex-wife,
Who broke my heart by giving my unborn baby to abortion's knife.
I still remember and love Merl, my childhood's very first friend.
Every friend is a pearl; and I have had friends who stayed true,
And friends that fell away in time's swift sway.  But I still love them all.
My family is my beloved family, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood;
Though my heart and my soul and my spirit are me; and I'm alone.
My mind is my own.
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Raisins in bread,
And how they spread--
As the baking bread expands--became the model of cancer,
In Dr. Galksy's book, *Everything You Need to Know About Cancer*.
Subtitled: *In Language You Can Actually Understand.*
Dr. Galsky is the only one who deeply cared about me, while he was here.
But then he moved States away.  For truly caring, Dr. Galsky has no peer.
His book is full of witty wordings, and humorous images--cookie factories
In uncontrolled over-production, likened to cancer. 
So I have a lot of cancer cookies.  Munch, munch, munch.  Got milk?
But I've read and been told to stay away from dairy products.  And sugar.
By concerned acquaintances.  And my few good friends who still remain,
Who can take me as I am, as cancer and its treatments make me;
My sorrowful long lack of a long-term loving lover; great grief I feel over
Brian's so undeserved sad, early death; 
And many other griefs of loss and hope that cut and shake me;
And all the pain.
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Yesterday.  Now there's a word that cannot stay!  The best word is today.
Sometimes I think that hope is called tomorrow.  But tomorrow's thread
Can be cut by cancer, even before cancer kills you dead.
The best word is today.  What happened yesterday?  I was told
The results of my latest tests.  So scientific, and scientifically expressed.
Whole-body bone scan.  CT urogram.  Lumbar MRI.
Snakes, like hair on a medical Medusa.  Techno lingo: It adds up to this:
I have a very painful death ahead of me, which too soon I have to die.
I have to choose among new treatments, with even worse side effects;
Sickness, weakness, brittle bones, scars, thin skin--a living body in decay.
I may lose the loving power that surgery gave, and be neutered of all sex;
Even if not, I'll be unappetizing, when all my remaining sex appeal wrecks.
Worst, my mind may be maimed or diminished--injuries to my deep self--
To my very spirit that prays to God, as I dream what lies beyond the sky.
The poisonous new treatments have a twenty percent chance to succeed.
I can choose to suffer them.  Or I can choose to let go, suffer what I must,
And just go.  Clusters.  I now have clusters.
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Clusters.
Not sweet, like those clusters of grapes. 
Not bright, like those clusters in the sky.
No.  Not these.  These clusters can kill.  These clusters make people die.
Clusters of abnormally enlarged lymph nodes. 
Two separate clusters in me, scattered lymph nodes; and each lymph node
Has become like a deadly grape-sized grenade, wired to a ticking clock:
Assassins swollen with cancer--death's time-bombs, presently to explode.
Thank you, Dr. Galsky, for caring about me.  I spoke my soul; you heard.
I heard my latest stage of fate yesterday. I feel fear of my fate and sorrow.
Hope is what I used to call tomorrow.  I feel now that hope is put away.
I will still eat grapes when I can.  I will smell flowers and I'll feel my hours.
I will open up the gratitude of my heart for my life, to God. 
I will breathe life lovingly.  Deeply. 
I will taste life bitter-sweetly,
As time, passing, touches me.
I'll glorify my eyes by the sight of the stars.  The green and gold of earth.
I'll fill my eyes and ears with the world, and my heart will fill with love.
The best word is today.

==============================
Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Written on Tuesday, March 22, 2011  2:51 pm 
58 degrees F.  Humidity: 26%  Forecast: overcast
Copyright (C) 2011 by Michael LP.  All rights reserved.