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SCATTERED

Scattered by sickness,
I feel absent, dispersed;
sand blown across concrete.

The sight comes to me.
My father pouring oil,
and as I hold the funnel,
my reflection in the oil
pouring down into a metal bowel.

My grandmother's hands,
my absent mother's voice
on Mother's Day, sunny.

A thousand Jewish faces gaunt,
drawn in ink, stretched,
lengthened by sorrow,
until they melt into mine,
reflected in oil

disappearing like a genie,
back into its bottle,
into a metal engine,

softness lost in hardness,
harshness, hotness,
the unforgiving brutality
of cancer, that pocks the face,
craters intestines with black humour.



SCATTERED II

In dreams, my hand closes over a foreign throat
an unknown windpipe collapses in my grip.
Anger tears me so I whip as a crazed dervish
trapped in a scarlet den of heat, careless of pain,
temples throbbing with vicious blue veined fire.

On waking, moonlight bathes my clammy skin,
light curtains float gentle as feathers.
I pull stifling blankets back from my own throat.
They are damp with moisture sucked from my skin
by virus, and by the spinning Earth that makes me dizzy
with its endless, endless rotations.



SCATTERED III

Ah, the sunshine of health! Where are you?
I lie and lie, listening to the passing of time
in the quietest hours of the night - it is marked
by the pulse of traffic lights and ocean breakers.

I lie, and toss, and lie again a different way,
listen to the moments of this precious life dripping
as sick-fumed saliva not far from where I am;
dripping as far as I myself can go - just to my pillow.