Dreaming and Seeming

My mind sees--or seems to see--marks of mind,
In the world of living things, designed.
I cannot disbelieve.
But my heart feels compassion,
For the vast continuing sufferings of living things.
Torment and torture in nature, and by humanity.
All against one, and one against all.
I have, from my first moment of learning of suffering,
Felt brotherly sympathy for those who must endure.
Now, I also suffer. 
What I once knew only as something to feel compassion for,
Now has fallen on me. 
I feel the fangs and deep-glutting gullet of cancer.
I have already started my fall.
With my kind of cancer, I am going to be tortured terribly.
It seems I futilely call.
Sometimes I wish I had jumped off that cliff, and taken that faster fall:
Onto the hard sharp stones and the blank void that waited below.
Or whatever awaits me at the end of life--I cannot know.
How can I say it waits, if nothing is waiting for me there?
How can I say it waits for me, if there will be no me anymore?
I'm scared.  More scared than I ever was before.
Not a coward.  I have not cowered from the defense of those I love.
Nor would I ever flee from such defense by death's fear--
But death's fear is here.
Not a coward.  There are people--and even things--I would die for.
But the fear that is here, would still be there.
Yet I would be willing to die for people and things I love.
But to die this way--for nothing--makes me naked to my fear.
Makes me feel how real is my animal physicality, which faces demise.
Yet sometimes I feel--sometimes I see--
A spirit, a soul--seeming so real--looking out of me--
In the life looking out of my eyes.

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Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Written on Saturday, December 18, 2010  11:53 pm
Temperature: 57 degrees F.  Humidity: 67%  Forecast: overcast
Copyright (C) 2011 by Michael L.P.  All rights reserved.