Donna
There is no 5th Amendment
to protect us
from having to bear witness
to our own death.
You lie in your hospital bed
in Thunder Bay,
the most intimate witness
to a vicious game of Pac-Man
of which your body is the battleground,
and the Humerus, the Lung, the Phalanges,
the Femur, the Patella
are battle sites
as notorious and hard-fought in their way
as the Somme, Ypres, Dunkirk, Sarajevo, Iwo Jima, Dien Bien Phu...
Cancer is the body’s deicide, the lie
at the heart of life. Death
is a genetic command performance.