POEM: WHAT THE LIVING DO

After Marie Howe

It begins with the excavation of a body,
the bloody sutures, the swollen diseased
organ, removed, until the body is

reconfigured beyond recognition.
There is salvage radiation of the prostate bed
that rescues nothing, that only gets more painful

with each of the thirty-three treatments until the smell
of burnt flesh pervades. Until the scarred tissue, purple
as a bruise, is pissed as a passing blood clot, until

everything feels char-broiled. Extra well done.
The Lupron injections they give in the hip removes all
testosterone from the body. It’s the same drug they give to

serial rapists, leaving a sweating mass at night,
leaving exhaustion, leaving weakness so much stronger
than was thought possible at the end of a day,

leaving a voice too hoarse to speak, and the sleep too
short to be restful. Then the  fists-full of Enzalutamide,
pills like small planets, to further reduce

testosterone, hoping to starve the cancer once more.
Until lesions appear, lighting up the bone-scan like a
Christmas tree, so now is the time to inject Radium 223

Dichloride into the blood, drunk up by the poor bones,
eroding by the day, until that stops, and then Docetaxel
is poured into veins and the body is scoured from the

inside out. Here is the nausea. Here, is the hair loss.
And there is the neuropathy to look forward to.
It’s hard to make a good accounting of where one

has been when the body has lost track of what
is good.  All of this is what the living do. How anger is
useless. How fear is replaced by the clinical callousness

of whatever the next treatment is.  Yes, Yes you say.
That makes sense, because it allays death one more time.
And this is what the living do.

Reading Ginsberg’s “Kadish” in the dark, fingers
sweeping across the page with the hope that the
words will be absorbed by finger tips, to find their

way to those dark spots on the spine, because we use
everything at our disposal to swat away the flies that
gather around us, even if it makes no sense at all.