Another Thursday, Another Hammer

Warm and friendly faces;
Friendly handshakes, caring hugs, and friendly embraces.
Kind and caring words...holding hands and sharing words.
This will happen for others today;
But not for me.
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Once more, I will be lonely.
Once more, my heart will ache.
It will ache with love that cannot be expressed.
It will ache with sorrow that cannot be told.
It will ache with loss that cannot be said
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My mother and my brother are now both dead.
My brother died last October; my mother died the October before.
Last December I learned thaf cancer, for me, is something to die for.
I desperately needed and still need my support group's loving true support.
But my patient counselor stopped liking me, and gave me a bad report;
To fabricate the purported basis to jeopadize my life with this lonely exclusion.
I had thought she might not know the extent of my woe, that she might have some confusion.
For she knows too much strress could activate and accelerate my cancer, and much sooner kill me.
Then four Mondays ago my oncologist offered to let her know; to show her my poem,
"Thursday's Hammer," which speaks of how disturbingly not having my support group is hurting me.
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And so I hoped that, soon again, Thursdays--
Now my life's worst days--would go back to being the best.
Three Thursdays ago, I actually expected to go, and I combed my hair, and I got properly dressed--
I waited for a phone call to summon me back from the dead.
And the awful cancer treatments, that make me feel so weak and empty and loveless and old,
Were--in the spark of that hope, in the actual expectation of that phone call--
Gone, just as dark goes when light floods the pathways of the eyes.
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I expected to get that saving phone call, not as a surprise,
But almost as a certainty.
My oncologist had taken a copy of "Thursday's Hammer" from me:
My poem of anguish over being ousted 
Out of my fellow and sister cancer patients' gatherings, stealing from me that needed mutual support.
I was Kicked Out by the patient counselor; not for just cause, but because we had jousted,
With differences over the issue of a poem I had written which showed that I was then very deprressed;
"Time's Gift and Rift";
A poem I had written as if my heart's blood had broken out from my poet's pen and bled;
A poem that showed that I felt the world was for me then very cruel and cold.
The patient counselor then guessed I was clinically depressed, and even suicidal; but my grave
Had been taken away; I had just learned that family money needs had caused the selling of my burial plot,
And now it is too late: no money, no insurance; so I will be heaped in randomly with others,
Paupers all--but how many of them once had a burial place, which had been sold by their mothers?
I'm sure it was intended that my burial place would be replaced; but time and tomorrow have caught me now.
No marker for me: just a place to rot, with several other people's bodies and bones; and be forgot.
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So, yes, I was very, very, very depressed that day.  Clinically depressed, I would have to say.
But not suicidal; still loving life, even in the depths of devouring grief.
But the patient counselor rejected me, from that day forth; she decided to lose me like an Autumn leaf.
She rolled over me like tons of water from a drowning sea, in a killing tidal wave.
She was ruthless and loveless to me, as I cried and begged her not to exile me.
She claims to know God and to have love; as if her cruelty could be the fruits of any kind of good belief.
She made me feel like a lost damned soul, cut off from people I liked as friends and who seemed to like me.
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So I had written "Thursday's Hammer" out of my depression, despair, sorrow, pain, and anxiety.
Now, when my oncologist took a copy of that poem from me,
He said that he would show it to the patient counselor, so that she could see
The terrible depth of my misery,
Still caused by what she has done to me.
Good idea, good idea!  So I thought.  If she reads this, then he will see.  Surely now she would set me free.
Surely now she would lift the bar and ban on me,
And invite me to join again with my support group, which every Thursday I recall, and where I pine to be.
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But she did not call me.  Last Thursday, too, I waited and hoped; I hoped she still had some love for me,
Or that at least she cared enough about me to help to ease my fear and pain and sorrow, and set me free.
Free to come and go at my own cancer clinic; free to come for the comfort of my own support group.
Whoever heard of a cancer victim being thrown out of a support grroup, anyway?
Everyone who knows of it must at least suspect that I must have done something terrible;
Because to kick a cancer victim out of his support group, while he begs and cries to remain, is terrible.
So the only excuse could be, if he did something really terrible.
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I think that nothing I could have done or said makes me deserve this kind of dying, this kind of being dead.
Tell me what I did!  Tell me!  Tell me what I should not do, tell me what I ought to do.  I understand words.
Yes--oh, yes--I understand words.  I could copy them into my heart and do whatever she might say.
But it was not to be. 
Today, a third Thursday since she knew how much I am suffering, has smashed me with the hammer of Thor.
Now I know she knows fully what her decree has done to me, and is doing to me.
So that my loss and grief have grown to so much worse, and so much dreadfully more.
I never imagined how impossibly unhappy it is possible to be; not even in my grossest grief before.
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I know she knows now what her inflexible, unloving, unrelenting rejection of me, is inflicting on me.
So I know, if she ever had even the smallest love for me, she now has no love left at all,
Not even respect for my humanity.
I must face my grief over my lost loved ones, and my loneliness, and my great fear, regret, sorrow, and pain,
Without the support and caring and sharing of my support group.  My whole life is now dying in vain.
New griefs grind me up; I'm losing my tall proud height, my bones are so leeched and bleached.
My cancer treatments make me unable to seek and find the comfort and pleasure of female companionship
And love.
I'm facing the loss of my health-care insurance, which scares me with a much sooner painful death.
I need help now, more ever before, more than from any other hoped-for helping hands for which I have reached.
Soon but slow, the vanity of my life will vanish in the insanity of this cancer and all its coming curses.
All I have for venting my life's sadness, pain, and fear, over the painful end of my breathing of life's breath,
And for sharing my soul and heart and mind about my life, my love of life, and all that I love,
Is this, the vanity of my verses. 
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This last year--since my diagnosis--has been, like all my time now, so terribly fleeting.
Halloween is coming.  I'll bet they'll have cardboard decorations in our meeting room.
Perhaps even candies and cookies.  I would so gladly munch on a couple or a few.
Thanksgiving is coming, too.  I wonder what, for that holiday, they will do?
Perhaps another pot-luck meal, like my last meeting--
The one I did not know would be the last one, followed by my doom:
The end of any love from them for me or my enchanted loom.
Christmas is also coming; maybe they will give each other gifts on whatever Thursday
Becomes the day for my support group to celebrate the joy of the season.
But I must stay away; though I don't really know any real reason.
I can only hope that God will have much more mercy for me, than she.
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I phoned her last week on Friday, and left this message on her voice mail box or answering machine:
"I'm not doing very well.  I'm hoping that you will talk with me.  I need to talk with you.  Please call me back."
She did not call back.
So-called patient counselor!  For me, she has refused to be my counselor,
And has become instead the patient cancelor.  I have been treated,
Not like someone suffering from cancer, but as if I were myself a cancer, something to be cut out,
And discarded--like a thing without feelings, without heart, without needs, without rights--just canceled. 
While I still have life, I need to feel supported--to feel loved.  I know I am about to be permanently canceled.
The patient counselor is not patient; and she does not care to give me any saving counseling.
No soft place for me to fall; no listening love for my disturbed call; no safe ledges to stop my long slow slide
Into the darkest deepest depression I have ever known, making the skeleton of suicide
Dance alluringly, assuringly, in end-of-grief, end-of-it-all, pain-voiding promise--in nothing, narrowly--
No love, no time, ungiving and unliving--in depthless deep undreaming non-sleep, worldlessly wide.
Till then, I must keep adding new tears to all the foolish fall of tears that I have so futilely cried.



--PoetWithCancer (M.L.P.)
aka Mr. Poet
Written on Thursday, October 8, 2009   6:30 p.m. PDT
Copyright © 2010 by M.L.P.  All rights reserved