I love you, Brian.
I miss you, my wonderful friend.
How your sense of humor lightened me!
How your open-hearted  reach of friendliness to all
Moved me to admire you.  So many admirable qualities!
Only, just as I once was, you had such deep insecurities,
And your greatest fault was you could not see your own value.
I saw your value, but what does it mean?  I'm nobody.
The Cancer Center and hospitals have shown that to me.
Just as they showed that to you.
All my dreams and love of life and the wonderful things in life,
Still make me no more than a bug stepped on by cancer, in their view.
I've always been compassionate for people and creatures.
But once, when I expressed fear and regret at my early painful death,
Grief at losing much of my life, so many years I had expected to enjoy--
As I also weep my heart out, for the decades of loving life Brian lost--
I was told disdainfully by one doctor that "everybody dies"
And so to him my suddenly facing dying of cancer
Was no big deal.  Just suck it up and take it, because everybody dies.
But pieces of my life are cut by cancer's knife every day. 
Needles and blood draws
And radiological scans; nervously awaiting judgment at the chopping block;
And sickening treatments with side effects that bite with big jaws,
And pester and sting like flocks of flesh-feasting flies;
And months, for Brian, and some years for me, before the final fall of fate,
Nauseate; and I suffer.  Just as my precious beloved friend Brian suffered. 
First having had to watch my best friend suffer and die,
Now, alone and lonesome, still grieving for him, I feel my living days fly by.
Partly dead already, I drag my former dreams in pain.
Brian suffered also.  Yet some say that only the day of "execution" differs.
As though peacefully, painlessly dying in bed, surrounded by care and love,
At age 80 or 90, or more, were an "execution"
No different from slow tortured dying over months or a few or several years
Of cancer-devoured days, lived in progressively worse pain, and futile tears.
Are they so ignorant of what so many a late-stage cancer victim suffers?
They talk the same language as the Cancer Clinic and hospital maws.
And, like them, they make us nobody.
But the cold Cancer Clinic and the hospitals' icy ICUs actually abuse.
I care more about bugs than they care about human beings.

==============================
Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka (thanks to Luna Marie) Mr. Poet
Written on Thursday, June 2, 2011  11:53 pm PDT
70 degrees F.   Humidity: 8%    Forecast: overcast
Copyright (C) 2011 by Michael LP.  All rights reserved
(I still copyright my writings, for my estate)