“To lose the touch of flowers and women’s hands is the supreme separation.”

--Albert Camus

Cleopatra questioning a eunuch: “Hast thou affections?”

The eunuch replying to Cleopatra: “I dream what Venus did with Mars.”

--Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra

“To lead a better life, I need my love to be here.”

--The Beatles, Here, There, and Everywhere

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned

that there lay within me an invincible summer.”

 --Albert Camus

I say I love life.  And I do.  But I have almost no pleasure left, and cannot grow.

And that pleasure is so infrequent, so little sweet, and so fleet and small—

Next to nothing at all.  And soon, I fear, it finally will become nothing at all.

I’m so lonely, so lonesome, so romantically alone.

The last blood-test shows I’ve got just thirty nanograms left of testosterone;

It certainly is not what a man needs, to be a man; but it too will go.

-----------------------

I have no wife, only an ex-wife; I cannot even talk to her: she’s no longer listed.

I have no girl friends, only former girl friends.

They know me as I once was, not as this thing that I now am.

No, that’s too harsh; I know I am much more than a mere thing.

My skull has a tongue in it and can sing.

My mind has powers of memory and analysis, creativity and imagination,

And capacious comprehension—gifts beyond the typical, that go for the grail.

My great grief is that I no longer am, biochemically at least, fully a male.

“Androgen,” after all, means man-maker.  I’ve been deprived of testosterone—

The main androgen—chemically castrated, deformed into a chemical eunuch.

My sexuality is crippled, and my self-concept is scored with scars.

Yet I hunger for love: as Shakespeare said, I dream what Venus did with Mars.

I dream of when, before prostate cancer, I was able to live a full rich love-life:

The several times when I had girl friends, and the seven years that I had a wife.

-----------------------

I am still a loving man; but not the lover that they knew.

Only in my mind and my heart and my dreams, I remain so.

I remember all the loves I have had, and have lost with the time that flew.

Some few I still speak with and see; but I am not the man they used to know.

They know me from old memory: the passionate man they intimately knew.

They know me as the sensitive poet;

The intelligent, studious guy,

Who was quite shy,

And who would often blush at words of love,

The touch of a hand,

The mere prospect of a kiss.

But they know also desire stood behind the reddened flush

Of the embarrassed shyness of every blush.

And I had strong desire;

The fire would envelope me, engulf me;

And, once going, the drive would carry me all the way.

-----------------------

Then, after loving—as also during and before—there was love.

Sex can be the core of so much more:

Romance, roses, kisses, hugs, shared dreams,

Help and support, mutual caring, comfort, shelter, a soft place to fall.

Someone to grow old with, together to face the world and the loud last call.

And for the very lucky, to crown the pleasure of loving with the joy of children,

Children of two true loves, the miracle of continuing human life.

But all my organs are dead and dry; now I cannot father even a test-tube baby.

I once wrote I could live without loving, and without love; that’s because I knew

I would find loving and love again; but now I suffer: for this is no longer true.

Now I cannot have love because I cannot make love; and nothing for it I can do.

-----------------------

My cancer consumes my life.

My happiness, my hopes, my dreams, my peace—

And the monster still has lots of fleshly territory to claim.

But in the meantime, before the physical pain in earnest begins,

There is the grief of heart I suffer from the medical treatments.

No cure, just treading water, waiting for the start of my slow slaughter.

Now I have to live the dying life of no kisses, no caresses, no tender love-looks;

No heart-felt love-words; no warm human hugs and whole-hearted closeness.

No passion, no loving, no pleasure, no love!

No hope to hear the laughter of my longed-for children,

Forever imprisoned in voided possibilities, lost in unfruitful stopped time.

For once, in my knowledge-hungry life, I am not fully happy with my books.

For I shall have no lover; and I cannot have one: for I cannot be one.

-----------------------

I once hoped that surgery would set me free;

But now I don’t know.  Perhaps there is nothing that can be done for me—

Except, by radiation and hormone repression, to prolong a loveless life a while,

In increasing weakness, sickness, sorrow, and pleasureless pain;

This is all that medical science seems able to achieve for me;

Though science eclipsed, for me--with a love of reality, real truth, and honesty--

My hope for good treatment, kindness, mercy, and love from heaven above;

Yet it fails me in my crisis time, and leaves me here unhealed and unfree,

Eventually, very likely, to die a dreadful cancer death:

Protracted pain, bodily wasting, mental anguish;

And medicates my fate with sadness and sorrow—

As John Lennon sang, crippled inside—

Until the day I shall have died.

-----------------------

I shall not be allowed to enjoy and love all my life-span’s promised years.

I am abandoned: terribly to die; and before then, to live lonely;

And to have my loving heart bereft of love.

I can no longer have a pure joy—not one that does not come also with pain.

I cannot have unpoisoned happiness.  All my gladness is grafted to sadness.

No new dawn brings relief, but torments like a thief taking the last of life away,

And pushing me towards the days of abominable pain and dreaded deep death.

Every day now is plagued with fear, sorrow, grief, and futile tears.

-----------------------

What will I do?  Suffer through.  I leave my final fate and all the rest to God.

I love life.  So I will take my joy, along with pain; I will enjoy my happiness,

And down the poison with it.  Whenever I can, I will glow with life’s gladness,

Even from the dark center of the deepest sadness my heart ever knew.

Yes, it might have been better for me to have been hit by a bus, than this.

But this happened; I’ll hack from this hell, despite all hurting, some happiness.

Just because the game seems to be already lost is no reason to quit.

-----------------------

As Albert Camus, the humane philosopher I love the most, years ago said,

So I now say, in my different way, in my own unique soul’s special paraphrase:

In the midst of this mortal misery, this bitter winter,

I find—within myself—the miracle of God’s image, the I am, the self:

I find my life, my consciousness—inescapably, as long as I exist, the center—

The core of existence—the gift of self, precious consciousness, luminous mind:

My heart overflows with the invincible summer of the love of life.

I love the stream of steam that is my living time,

The dream-sequence of all my shining days;

And I shall not lose my love of life,

Until and unless I must be totally timeless in the eternity of the dead.

I love life; I have always loved life; I will continue to love life.

I will drain life to the dregs before death, to taste life’s last possible sweetness,

Embedded though it be in the depths of the cruelest most painful bitterness. 

I will keep life as long as I can; and, as long as I have breath, I will love life.

=======================
Written by Michael LP, aka MLP
aka PoetWithCancer, aka PWC, aka Mr. Poet
Written on Thursday, June 4, 2009  8:50 AM
Temperature:  790 F.   Winds: 2 MPH
Copyright (C) 2011 by Michael LP.  All rights reserved