PART 1 | HAROLD  

 

There are seven ways you can die and none of them is from boredom.

 

You can die from a broken heart,

broken into so many pieces that none of the parts remember how to start,

the dust weighing you down like a blanket suffocating the sound

of your beloved out.

 

You can die from regret,

a lifetime of letting yourself down — sometimes once is enough,

the gears inside you all seized up,

the wheels unable to turn another cog. 

 

You can expire from too much expectation,

the weight of all that want crushing you with the uncompromising truth

of existence

swooshing out of you like a balloon.

Who’s going to do all those things now that you can’t?

 

Sadness is one of them too.

It’ll seep out of you like oil from a machine that’s been left too long

to sit in the sink and think.

Until you become so dissolved by the losses around you, the desolation

growing inside you,

there may as well be no difference between you and it.

 

This is why the salesman’s wife jumps off the bridge.

 

You can die from over exposure,

to the heartless nature of common things,

to self-neglect and the elements.

This is how the drunks and the degenerates go.

From being left out in the cold for so long that it seeps into their bones

and begets God to speak of himself in tongues.

 

Least but not last, you can die by accident.

Through no fault of your own.

The price you paid for living a life — for daring

to come into this world all alone.

How many of us go like that?

Without the least bit of intention.

One big misunderstanding

— in the end.

 

Finally, you can drown. 

 

​

 

To live is to be tarred by the brush of your own tragedy.

Not many people realise this.

They’re too preoccupied with their highly meaningful lives,

filled with ungrateful children,

searching for answers,

hiding from God.

 

Harold knew it —

tried to take the time to remind himself that none of it mattered.

The thing about time

is it’s always the one doing the taking.

Tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow you’ll be dead

and flat or round it won’t matter.

The evangelists will have finally been consumed by their holy fires

and not one of them will have been right.

 

If the cells contain hormone receptors,

there’s a good chance she’ll still be going through this in five-year’s time.

If the cells are HER-2 positive

it’s time to start praying to her absent God.

If it’s metastasized — well, she’s fucked.

My words, not hers.

The lady lying next to me fills me in on the particulars of her form

before they kindly cut off her breasts for her.

 

On the far side a far sadder sight,

a child, bald, animated, barely alive.

Let it not be said that the feng shui of St Jude’s Oncology

doesn’t have is ontological half-life. 

 

The woman tells me about her own daughter,

how well adjusted she is

and how terrible she feels for putting her child through this,

as if she might be responsible for her own illness —

I think that perhaps she is.

 

“Well adjusted to what?” I ask not unkindly.

“The art of living or the art of dying?”

The woman scowls.

She’ll be out of here in a week once the stitches have healed,

then she’ll no longer have to put up with degenerates like with me.

That’s when the real battle starts — her fight against reality.

 

She’s thirty-six years old.

Nobody has the guts to tell her she won’t make it to seven.

In six months, she’ll be dead,

killed by a game of a Russian roulette with her left breast.

 

Her war began thirty-six years ago.

We try and make things matter whatever way we can, but deep down,

we all know.

 

As for the kid…

the poor bastards didn’t know where to begin.

They should have put her in in a sack with the cats —

but us humans, we don’t do that.

So instead, they’ll let her suffer.

Test after test after test until all they’ll be testing is how much dignity they have left. 

 

I tell her dignity is a word for grown-ups,

a blanket of pride and protection

to fashion around ourselves in the face of God’s embarrassment that is our death.

But a child does not need to hear that. Madeline doesn’t care.

They tell me not to speak to her when it’s her that doesn’t speak to strangers.

She just wants it all to stop,

still believes in ethereal things like unicorns and parents

— and unconditional love. 

 

So, I shuttup.

Johnny Cash lies in his cave and waits.

For what exactly none of us can say.

We spend our days surrounded by unspoken words

because the Truth, for some

can be a little too much.

 

Wednesday

a sybaritic woman walks in carrying her expectations like an unfillable bag,

she ensures us all that she doesn’t intend on being here very long.

She too speaks about her children and all the remarkable things they’ve achieved.

As for her, her catastrophe is that she is a perfect imitation of everything that’s ever happened to her —

a carbon copy of the world that made her this way.

I wonder to myself, who does she blame?

 

Thursday

they wheel an old man in — ears like an elephant.

He looks his grown son in the eyes and begs of him not to let him go like his wife did,

to do the right thing when the time comes.

They both know what this means.

The implication swills fat like a fish between them, until he finally says it — softly, gently:

George, just suffocate me in my sleep, okay...

Those steel grey eyes, the horrors they’ve seen, the things they implored.

How else, but for love, could a father ask murder of his child?

           

In these dying days my visitors account to one.

Dr. Price, a self-satisfied animal takes an academic curiosity in me,

I a distasteful one in him.

He has the personality of a clock you see.

Its unfathomable to a man like that

that a man like this

can exist… and for so long;

that I can live off nothing but wine and Dostoevsky and the selfsame cancerous air that we breathe.

He spent fourteen years getting to this bedside,

well, I spent my entire life.

So, I ask you, which one of us is more qualified?

 

We speak about medical things, the doc and me.

He preaches in percentages, I in absolutes,

together we come to an understanding.

He seems to understand that our tragedy is never about if.

I tell him there might very well be a very pointlessness to our existence —

that the only thing we need to a cure for is hope.

The problem with our doctor is that he doesn’t know how to take his time,

not like Harry did.

 

He tells me about trials — trials trials trials

and so many willing participants too.

The achievement’s there to be had, but it won’t be ours.

Spectacular Doctor, Brilliant Drunk — Find Cure!

Of all the imposturous things people do, the most incredulous has always been

how it takes so many to give the credit to so few. 

Where would the wealthy be without the poor?

Where would the dogs be without Pavlov?

Where would our good doctor be without his drunk?

What can I say —

we each sacrifice ourselves away to the cancers of the day.

 

Cancer — what a word

I’ve heard that cankerous ca sound cut many a cord short.

Cancer on the brain,

Cancer on the lung,

Cancer in the left breast holding a gun.

 

Can – cer — lingering like a cacophony at the back of the throat,

forcing one to contemplate the horror

of the sound.

Oh, I don't mean horror in the spoken sense,

of what words try to be,  

no, no, no  

horror in its full sagacity —

a ripped reality.

Where even the best among us is beaten senselessly to death by what things mean. 

 

They say it’s quick, but it never is.

The difference potential between two years and six months,

how many car-crashes can you fit into that?

 

Pauli the Knife caught it first

At the time we all thought the kid deserved it.

He’d spent a year in prison because he super-glued his cheating wife's cunt shut

— or so the story went.

Who knows, she probably deserved it too. 

Desire ruins us all darling,

ain't that a truth. 

 

The disease caught Pauli right in the throat,

sent a dagger down his gullet until he was talking through a hole.

Kid kept making these terrible catatonic sounds

like a carburettor that wouldn’t start.

 

They’ll tell you that’s what you get for playing with knives when

in truth

it’s the price each of us pays for living a life.

Pauli didn’t deserve to go like that, no one does,

but you and me, darling, we know what goes on.

 

They let Paul suffer seven long months

before they carried the poor bastard out.

A closed casket to hide what they had done.

Did you know?

A body can eat away at its own blubber and bone

until not even the smell of rotting decay remains.

Death knows how to disinfect itself.

 

Perhaps you’ll remember me too when your times comes,

perhaps we’ll keep on going like that, father to son,

mother to daughter, sinner to saint,

saint to only God knows what.

 

It’s said by certain holy men that we each die twice.

Once when the time comes.  

Twice when someone says

our name for the last time.

 

What they don’t tell you, the doctors and the priests

is that you don’t die from the cancer.

You decease from all the things that cause the disease.

Not names but their sake,

radiation and cellphones and cigarettes,

chemotherapy and too much burnt toast and too little bad sex.

The very oxygen that you breathe

— the Life in the magazine

wearing our ragged little cells down until they spasm and start to freak out.

 

But really, if they were being honest,

they’d tell you that you drown.

 

Drown from desperation, while holding on with one arm out.

drown on hopes and expectations and large outside sounds,

drown on all the things the sounds couldn’t drown out,

drown from too much pulmonary fluid filling into your lungs,

drown from the hum of existence drowning itself out.

Drown, drown, drown.

 

You’ve done it before too, haven’t you?

Drowned on air when you came out your mother’s womb…

Well, you’re going to drown again,

right before they put you back six feet underground.

 

(If it seems that I’ve never had much of a stomach for God

It must mean my maker never had much of one for me) — you see,

I used to believe that the pit was endless,

but I’ve finally found its measure.

The dirt and the horror have risen from their dank dominion and these lungs

have begun to whisper, enough — enough.

​

Our ships don’t sink because of the water surrounding us,

they sink because we let the water in.

Oh God, what will we do to you when the time comes.

 

​

 

Harry is in hospital.

Harry is under a park bench.

Harry wasn’t loved enough by his mother.

Harry’s father loved him too much.

Harold finds beauty in the eaves beneath the trees and wonders what sort of hell could compare.

Harold holds onto the terrible things they’ve done to him,

here and here and there —

the important men and the impervious ones,

the women who can’t stand certain smells and their dogs who can.

Harold wonders what sort of means justified Harold’s end?

Harold’s only worth what’s written on the page,

which will be worth so much more once Harold’s dead.

Harold is all Harold has.

 

When Harold’s time comes it comes all at once.

It sucks him like a vacuum back into the brilliant hue-and-hum of that pointless existence

from which he had been free all along.

He was nothing more than a witness.

 

It flickered – and then was gone. They had missed it. 

The noble wife

The brave little girl

The good doctor and all his merry men

 

Echoing through the dying chambers of my mind

I could have shown it to them then.

 

The answer,

but I didn’t. 

​

​

PART 2 | KAREN

 

She swallows the pills one by one

 

 

What do my possessions say about me when the lights go out? 

Do they gossip and tell tall stories? Do they laugh? 

Or do they lie there dispassionately, 

dead unto an existence from which I too will soon be gone.  

 

What a silly thing it seems to me now 

to have pursued endless wealth in the face of such a certain and careless death. 

I want to give it all away, 

to save my children from their fate.

I do not think it would count now, 

not towards any kind of salvation anyway. 

Who was I to fight the fires of my desires?

The teacher asks: children, what have we learned? 

That there is nothing more valuable in this life than another breath.

 

It seems an unforgivable sin to have spent so little of my life getting to know God. 

I wish that I could say that it was because I tired of trying to figure everything out, 

but the truth is I was too distracted by all of the flowers to notice. 

 

If He is kind, my maker might say I was too busy fulfilling whatever destiny he had planned for me.

Would you take this gift again, given the choice? 

Knowing that you would make the same mistakes? 

Were they even ours to make?

 

Dr Price informs me that the cancer has gone to my brain. 

No cymbals, no tremolos, just his gentle monotone, practised and resigned 

— but at least I wasn’t alone. 

You’ll see, when your moment comes, it will punch the breath right out of you too. 

It’s hard for either of us to say what this means. Sometimes it feels like nothing, other times everything. 

Like all things, it seems to depend on who and where and how many and how much.

We don’t discuss luck.

 

Do you remember that story about Charles Whitman? 

The marine that killed his mother and wife with a knife. 

He went to six different doctors before he did it, so they can’t say that he didn’t give them fair warning; 

but as with all serious matters of mind, nobody took the time. 

There is only so long someone can live with a wildfire raging inside their head 

before they must get out of the building. 

Poor Charles Whitman, he left a note, asking them to cut him open when it was all done 

— then climbed a belltower 

and shot thirty-one people with a machine gun.

 

They found a tumour the size of walnut pressing right up against his amygdala; 

he knew what the doctors dismissed 

a demon nut in his brain — telling him to do God knows what.

 

Abigail's son has been diagnosed with Conduct Disorder; 

his ratio of grey-to-white matter is incurably out. 

CD is a euphemism for socially insane — 

you just can’t straight-up call a six-year-old a sociopath these days.

 

Oh my love, I know that you feel it too, 

what a ridiculous and unfair tragedy it is to be 

nothing more than a stepping stone in evolution’s callous game. 

I think this is why we lock all the incurable ones away. 

as if we could somehow subtract the chaos from the order by putting our wolves in a cage.

 

When so much is determined, 

when the difference between what is right and what is wrong 

is so plagued by what’s been written in our blood, 

who do we hold responsible?

Dear God, I pray not I.

 

I have so many questions. My head hurts 

(from the drug or the thing it’s killing?) 

Who is Karen, where does she reside? 

Where am I? 

Will this tumor send her away? 

If so, who will it send back in my place?  

 

You think of funerals at such a time.

You sit calmly in an office and listen to a doctor deliver your death sentence

as if he’s talking through ten feet of water 

and you think of your funeral. 

You’re so much kinder to yourself then, 

she was trying to be a good mother, a good wife. 

She was gentle, kind.

 

Some things won’t ever make sense, 

they’ll stomp their little feet and stand on their hind legs and refuse like children 

— then they’ll put you in a box and sing their songs 

and declare that’s all the news that’s fit for print. 

Here she was, now she’s gone.

 

Next to me there’s a decrepit old man, Harold, talking to death, 

his breath rattling like a broken tram. 

He looks twenty years older than whatever age he is. 

They tell me Harold doesn’t have long; that he was a famous writer… and a terrible drunk. 

Always in that order, as if the one justified the other, 

as if I don’t already know how all actions desperately cling to one another like rice.

For how long has this man been wallowing in his own private hell? 

Far longer than it took him to get him into that bed.

 

Buddhists call it Samsara — 

the wheel of death and rebirth driven by the endless day of our desire.  

As if living itself might be nothing more than a great addiction to be overcome.

Teaching your mind how to forget itself has always seemed such a cop out to me, 

but then, I didn’t get to live with them. 

Perhaps if I’m reborn a man, and a monk, next time round 

I’ll be able to free myself from the idea of suffering.

 

A girl Haley’s age lies across from me in bed 2B 

and it takes all of my strength to smile at her. 

Even when you’re up against the insensibility of your own impending death, 

some things feel greater. 

Take a million oblivions and ask each one: were we equal? 

Do all the small infinities eventually succumb to the highest one? 

Does each death deserve the same amount of forgiveness?

 

The girl smiles back at me with a feverish grin, 

as if she suspects she is the very reason for her being 

and I think perhaps she is.

 

What gets a mother through the day? 

The smell of coffee in the morning, 

a hug from a youngest child, 

the metanoia of each setting sun — 

moments of eternal grace between each new feeling.  

 

Thirty-six years after my inexplicable emergence 

I still have no idea how my father’s genes made it across the barrier of life — or why; 

or how magnets work,

or what hidden motion brings the monarch butterflies back home year after year, 

as if the very complexity of being 

might be no more sophisticated than the flicking of a switch.

 

Oh my love, memories of us spring forth like a flood, 

how will you remember me when I am gone? 

Will I echo in my children’s dreams? 

Will they understand that some things simply just cannot go on and on. 

And what of you, my unfaithful husband, 

what will you make of my final betrayal?

 

Will the memory of it rise up and drown me out?

(Was I the quake or was I the flood?)

 

Or did we snap like a branch in the dark,

Soft and unspoken.

 

Peter, please… teach our children not to desire worldly things. 

Teach them to sit still and listen to the ocean that swells within. 

Let them know that this world will quash you with its careless indifference no matter what; 

that the little things matter so much more than we think. 

Show them that they grew out of the ground like the insects and the antelope and the shrubs. 

Don’t let them live their lives inside of boxes. 

Teach them to wade through rivers and climb trees, 

to worship natural beauty. 

Make them taste the sun in everything they eat. 

Set them briefly free upon this earth 

that they may decipher the hidden language written in the seasons 

and know that even in this, our autumn wind, 

we were a love song.

 

A sea of static surrounds me now… 

I cannot go on much longer… 

I can see each new thought as it drifts apart… 

that small voice is beginning to shout.

 

I love you terribly.

 

 

​

 

 

A forest of aspens watches her depart, dark eyes on white bark

The violins vey the desperate drums,

their sound the rising terribleness of the sun.

The snow, at first a fall

 torrent

a frost

a drowning now

The scent of Sarajevo fills her lungs

how long the cold acre of her heart has longed

to rage, to thaw

to hear the rush of its own becoming once more

 

For nothing loved is ever lost

 

In the distant past

she can hear the calling of the monks

naiva kincit karomiti

 

I do nothing at all

nothing is done by me.  

 

 

PART 3 | MADELINE

 

 

There are thirty-one spaces of light between the shadows on the blind. 

I can hear mommy crying in the hallway when she thinks I am asleep. 

She says I will go to heaven for sure; 

not like all the unbaptized babies who are going straight to hell 

according to Mary, a girl in my class,

even though my father says they are innocent.

 

Mr. Bojangles is no place at all, he has been obliviated. 

Obliviated means wiped from existence. 

Uncle Jimmy is in purgatory, or so mommy says. 

That’s where you go when you’ve been neither good nor bad… 

but I’ve been both.

 

To sin means to miss the mark. 

Father John says I haven’t missed it nearly enough,

but I have my doubts. 

I lied about the death of Eugene the Rabbit. 

I accidentally squashed him when I rolled over in my sleep but in my defence, he was really old. 

My mom says death can be a mercy. 

I hope they’ll give me a lawyer in heaven. I am the only one who knows he didn’t die of fright. 

This is what Father John calls telling a tall story. 

 

Dr. Price says that I am unique. I am one of a kind. 

When I’m gone, I will go extinct, just like the dinosaurs did. 

I wonder if my parents will have another child. 

I wonder if they’ll call her Sally or Jim or Bill. 

Whoever it is, I hope she remembers not to leave the bathroom light on 

and knows to tickle Johnny Cash under his chin. 

Mary says if you think about an angel one appears, but I am yet to see one. 

What do you think happens when angels think of us?

 

​

 

 

Outside the old oaks are aching for a rain that is yet to come. 

Her mother is down the passageway, 

causing a commotion, 

imploring the nurses to hurry up. 

Mr. Cash looks up at her from the end of the bed, senses it too. 

Time has come.

 

A weightless insect settles on the branches of her lungs. 

It starts with one, then there are many, 

a million golden bees buzzing inside her body at once, 

carrying her up up up, 

leaving a small and fragile thing in her place. 

She floats past an orange butterfly bumping its head against the ceiling 

in suspended disbelief that there is nowhere higher it could be. 

She would take it with her if she could, 

but already her mind is streaming far beyond the place it has been briefly interred in; 

it is headed for the stars.

 

She feels an incredible surge pour out from the centre of the spinning wheel 

that is her heart. 

Unafraid, she dives headfirst into the stream, 

becomes one with its higher understanding. 

Diamonds begin to shimmer in every direction,

a phantasmagoria of sound and colour fragment into every aspect of the universe 

with which she has become. 

She is the very architecture that holds it up, 

the clock for which all time has stopped.

Far below her she can still sense the distant plane from which she has escaped, 

can feel the pull of it calling her back. 

A man on his knees, a woman too afraid to look through a doorway, 

in the middle of it all the avatar of a little being 

which she thinks must be me 

— and everything shatters at once.