New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day.
How many of them have I counted on their way?
Each New Year full of so much Maybe.
Each Old Year departs in unflowered scorn.
The New Year--represented by a baby--
That life itself may feel re-born.
Streets filled with party hats, horns, and confetti.
Bottles and cups and every kind of litter.
Mankind has come a long way from the Serengeti.
But time still remains sweet and fleet and bitter.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Where is the fire of my desire?
Where are the times when I felt wild love's joys?
Where are the living dreams that used to light my heart?
Where is the difference now between girls and boys?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The end was packed deep, with poisoned pins, on Jack-in-the-Box springs, in the start.
The poisoned needles like spider-fangs have sunk into the depth of my once-limitless choice,
Spiking my soul with grievous limits of shrunk life and cut-off time, crying my voided voice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
No loving frolics, no healing love-play, no hugging and kissing, no blessing caressing,
No heated heart, no petites morts, no satisfying little dying, no treasure of pleasure, no loving linking.
Only mournful memory, lonely imagination, unsensing dreaming, and mere fleshless thinking.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
All that's left me now, for real, is poetry, music, philosophy, science, literature, and art.
All?  Is not that enough?  No!  Not without love!  Love, that sweetens and never cloys.
Dying is so terrible; but then, my life was always really only a loan.
Worst of all is to live the last of life--and die--loveless and alone.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I am rejected, toally rejected.  Soon to be kicked out of life by tormenting cancer.
Now kicked out of loving and love by my poisonous cancer treatments.
Kicked out of the world of work--all my many skills, knowledge, and experience, regarded as nothing.
And I am treated as if worth nothing, too: Kicked out of my cancer support group, not worth helping--
Not worth caring about--not worth saving.  Bittlerly, reality cuts into my heart with that engraving.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I'm weak, I'm tired--I've lost all my muscles--I'm losing bone density and all my happy healthy glow.
My treatment's side effects have sterilized me and stolen away my sex. 
My treatment wrecks my world with worth-stripping woe.
I suffer grief of heart, and feel such shame, in deeper pain than any man should ever have to know.
I hear cold silence from the stars; and I still suffer blindly in my cosmic confusions.
But I have lost unkindly the last sweet dream of love and hope for life and all my foolish illusions.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Everything seems like nothing.  More and more so, with every day born to depart.
My well-read, well-loved books are losing the appeal of their once-lovely looks.
As a baby, I always woke with a smile, and never cried; from a child, I always laughed and smiled;
Always, even in the worst of circumstances, my heart loved life, and sang praise for all life's joys.
Now I cry below the silent sky.  I weep, and sometimes even wail.  My dreams die and my hopes fail.
Now for me, the illusion of life, ending like a brief rhyme, is poised to vanish away, into deep time.
All my poetry and music and writing seem to me like loud senseless soon-silenced noise.
Light leaking through the lasered loopholes of my lacerated heart.


--by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Written on Thursday, December 31, 2009 2:55 am PST  
Temperature: 37° F. (Feels like 37° F.)    High: 60° F.  Low: 36° F. 
Fair.        Wind: CALM       Visibility: 10 mi
Humidity: 60%  Dewpoint: 25° F.   Barometer: 30.35 in and rising
Sunrise: 6:51 am PST   Sunset: 4:35 pm PST
Copyright © 2011 by M.L.P. All rights reserved