I love the light.
Once, the darkness seemed very far away.
Suddenly, it has sprung up all around me, and I cannot get away.
I have fallen from a great height.
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I used to have great courage; I was happily courageous, and gladly very brave.
I grappled with life's problems, dangers, and threats--and I struggled and fought my way through.
I felt that there was nothing I could not overcome; nothing that I could not do.
Now, I look with shivering fear at my feet: to see the ground, opened for me--freshly cut with my grave.
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I used to have great upper body strength; and, generally, I used to be very healthy and strong.
Now I feel sickly much of the time; my proud strength is gone, and now I am shamefully weak.
My muscles have shrunk away; my bone density declines; and I have a sickened weakling's physique.
All caused by my cancer treatments--a blight to me: they seem less right to me, than they feel wrong.
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Before, I needed only six hours of replenishment and dreams from sleep--often only five.
Now sleepiness grips me, and drags me down; sharply cutting my wakeful hours.
Skull-faced nightmares terrify me; I awake in fear, shaking like storm-shaken dripping bowers.
My life has been cut short; and my remaining life, too often feels death-aimed, and only half-alive.
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My once supple skin has lost its tone and elasticity; in places, my skin sags sadly; I feel despair.
Still, somehow, some ladies I meet find me attractive; they futilely try to attract my diminished sparks.
Cancer treatments have devoured my libido like a cruel feeding frenzy of unmerciful great white sharks.
Cosmic care?  Like my patient counselor, cosmic silence mocks my tears, and coldly shows no care.
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My hair was reddish, a little more than year ago; now, it is that tint of white, called platinum blond.
Somehow, girls still like my hair--some even love it!--but I feel more sad and lonely, because of this.
For I cannot progress beyond a brief caress; and--once the start, now the end--a good sweet kiss.
I cannot bear to tell them why I stop and leave; and why I never come back to any girl who is so fond.
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I was singing happily, and caught the attention of a lovely girl, while I was out walking late one night.
She invited me in.  We watched Stone's Doors--we drank green tea.  She changed into a negligee.
She wanted me to make love to her.  I pretended I didn't know.  So sad.  She kept trying anyway.
She said: "You have beautiful hair; and such large, bright, penetrating blue eyes!"  But no manly might.
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A bit more than a year ago, I felt healthy and youthful.  Now, I'm like a joke: I fall, and I can't get up.
I find I'm losing my balance, and I fall, more and more often, as time goes by.
Sometimes I think I'd be better off to have a heart attack--quick and nearly painless--and just die.
But waiting for me ahead, before I'm dead, is an ever deeper, more and more bitter poisoned cup.
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When I begged to stay in my support group, my patient counselor mocked my tears, and she said:
"You're a grown man, and you're crying like a child!"
No.  I wept like a man with fatal cancer---whose sexuality is crippled---whose days are darkly defiled.
Treated, not like a man suffering cancer, but as if I were a cancer---cut out---as if I deserve to be dead.
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[No comfort from my support group now---and, probably, cold-bloodedly, never again---for me.
So little to ask for!  For---as Jim Morrison of The Doors sang so poignanty---I am desperately in need
Of some stranger's hand---the hands of those who understand--to salve my suffering, before I must bleed.
My patient counselor doesn't care that cancer will kill me: I'll be gone---gone is what she wants me to be.
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Crying like a child?  No: like a doomed man, cruelly kicked out of care.  As a child, I hardly ever cried.
At least, not for myself.  I cried for other people's hurts and losses.
My own, I bore without crying: but looked to another tomorrow to become a new today, as time tosses.
But now I weep for myself, sorrowfully and fearfully---stripped, equally, of shame and all my former pride.
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I didn't even cry much as a baby.  My mother told me I would always awake with a smile on my face;
And with merry twinkles in my little baby eyes---
The intelligence shining there---looking at the world with love and joyful curiosity, as a precious prize.
So I smiled at the world, as if I knew that each day wings into the world as a wonderful gift of grace.
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We patients were talking of our weekly goals; the counselor spoke of her ten-year plan---her eyes lit up.
She spoke gleefully of the added extra education she will get, and the happy advancing of her career.
This was early in my first cancer days: I wasn't then sure if I would get to live for even another year.
How can she still be as merciless to me as a monster-movie beast?  It makes me feel like just giving up.
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My very first pal in life, my brother, died in November; my beloved mother died in December.
Then I myself was diagnosed the following December with incurable cancer.  Next, I finally learned
How cold-blooded cruel people can be, when I was banned--before I must be buried or burned--
Exiled by the patient counselor.  My support group became a sadly lost treasure I can only remember.
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More than a year now, since she told me I could not come to my support group meetings anymore.
I only recently found out why, since she only would say I was disruptive, without specifying how I was, ever.
Almost anyone would imagine I must have done something truly terrible to be cut off--apparently forever.
She was supposed to help me; instead, she hacked my heart in half, and drop-kicked me out the door.
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Now she finally has told me why: She said I was coming to my support group meetings late, too often.
And too often I was too slow to leave, she also said.
So, for that, I have had to die a little bit more every day since then, before my cancer kills me, finally dead.
She does not care that too soon I'll be "the late"--my loved life lost--cold as her heart--in a coffin.
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If only she had ever warned me, "Michael, don't come to the meetings late anymore, or I will ban you."
Fair warning!  Or: "Don't be so slow in leaving, or I will kick you out of your support group--period!"
It isn't her support group: it's ours--cancer victims--especially those like me, who must too soon face God.
I had too much grief!  My loved ones' deaths and my cancer.  But, long after me--she must face God, too.
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She may even be responsible for my cancer not being removed, causing me painful early death;
For, at the very first meeting she barred to me, there was a guest speaker with life-saving information:
Information that could have saved me from a premature burial or an unnecessarily early cremation.
She knew--but still stopped me.  My blood is on her head, if allowing me would have prolonged my breath.
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She has fooled her supervisors--and so many others, fooled.  Her smiling face is false--yet so beguiling!
Those fortunate ones who are still allowed to come to the support group--oh, if they only knew!
If only they knew that, if they bothered her at all--as I did--without warning, she would kick them out, too.
If they cried, her heart would be as hard toward them as it is toward me--but she would still be smiling.
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Last September I had to remember: I cannot touch my mother and brother anymore, in this world.
The holidays loomed; I felt doomed and lost, abandoned and tossed; I needed help, more than before.
It seemed to me it would be too heartless, even for her, during this time, still to bar the door:
So I asked her to let me come to the support group's holiday meetings.  My whole heart I unfurled.
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The last holiday season was the first I had to face, since in my life so many horrible things happened.
I've heard the holiday season has the highest rate of suicide; because grieved people then profoundly recall
All that they have lost, and what they now must suffer; and, just so, I recalled and suffered it all.
Cursed with cancer, in abbreviated life--no mother, no brother--my life, badly, madly, sadly mis-shapened.
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So I asked the patient counselor to let me in again.  My whole heart I opened up to her, hoping.
Her heart she showed to me: Ice that cannot melt--hard, cold--unmoved by my pain and desperate need.
I asked her to say what I did wrong--what she wanted me to do instead!--I would make it part of my creed.
How happy for me, if she had let me back in!  But she didn't care about me, and left me groping.
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At first, I asked.  I believed she would see how important it was to let me in, at last--at least during this time.
When she refused, I begged her: Let me attend my support group's meetings!  I told her I felt suicidally sad.
She called the police on me: A police lady understood me, wanting me to be, as much as I could be, glad.
She cell-phoned the patient counselor--who said I would be allowed back in!  It was a lie--a heartless crime.
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Last December, I climbed a sheer cliff at the Valley of Fire, to see petroglyphs, four-thousand years old.
Then I looked down at hard jagged rocks far below--hard--cold--like the heart of my patient counselor.
My cancer fears and my life's sorrows swept into my soul.  I wondered: What am I even staying alive for?
I thought of jumping.  Then: Maybe next time.  Fear of death raced up and down my spine, ice-cold.
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Who can say for sure what the future will be?  But I hope I will hold on to my life, till life lets go of me.
Now I've been told by Dr. V: There is cancer in my spine.  My living spine that chills with fear of death.
The same spine that filled so full of that fear last December.  Love and fear drive my drawing breath.
Fear of death.  Love of my unique life--with bitter joy still lived--sorrowfully, painfully, slipping away from me.
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I love the light.
Once, the darkness seemed very far away.
I had life, love, knowledge, and skills; but my life has been cut short, to lose all--in final closing day.
I have fallen from a great height.