Richard Denner

HOMAGE TO No. 45 RUE BLOMET


Despair is great, and only humour noir helps to overcome it.

          -André Breton


I. Give & Take of Beauty: I'm Given the Words


I am drinking from the cancer cup with my lips

and the lips of those who have suffered before me


all of us drinking from the BIG cancer cup

a larger suffering, these older voices, these other souls


speaking through my heart, speaking directly to yours

of energies that turn us again to earth and fertility


There's deeper tissue here than I've yet laid bare

I would feel a sharp object in my abdomen


cutting gently and with an aim at laying open

not reasoning out the unreasonable reality of death


Enter my cells through the immense, gaping door

of my perspective, welcome to the innards of my sex


Here is a doorknob, here is a broom

Take the broom and sweep aside the artifices


Come inward, a geography trip

to my heart, my dick and balls


and my prostate


II. Vanity of the Prostate


I am Prostate


I'm a gland, a secretor of fluid

the size of a walnut, just below the bladder


I propel the semen through the urethra

a lubricator of soul, I'm the oil pump of the sex act


I am the second major cause of death in men

I am when I metastasize


I enter your seminal vesicles, your bladder, your sphincter

your lymph nodes, your spinal column, your bones


cells running amuck



III. Painpoint on a Scale of One to Ten


easy to say pain is just pain

like a jagged blade


easy to say pain passes

like night


easy to say pain is a point of view

when you're comfortable


IV. Wishing It Were Different


Allopathic treatments are radical prostatectomy

& brachytherapy, tiny radioactive seeds implanted


Possible side effects are urethral stricture, bleeding,

pulmonary embolism, incontinence, erectile dysfunction


e.d., a side effect of prostate surgery & brachytherapy

but, then, it's hard to get a hard-on when you're dead



V. Emptiness Beyond Within


hit below the belt, a gut reaction

do this, do that, do nothing


implant me with seeds

I'll radiate- dangerous to set a baby near me


piss through a screen, collect my isotopic seeds

return them to the manufacturer


six months of radiation, radiating out, radiating in

radiating in ten directions


breathe in the bad, breathe out the good


as long as I'm breathing


VI. Light Expanding on Light


biopsy reveals

a tumor


staged at T2, Gleason score of VI/X and psa of 6.3

protocol of cellar forte, grapeseed phytosome


breast basics, beta plex, cyto-redoxin, green tea

zinc, Eskimo oil and sun-ripened tomatoes


sulfur-containing amino acids from animal proteins

lower blood pH suppressing production of 1,25(OH)2D


I'm ok with my death, makes me a gentler lover

not ramming my hardness into you


touching your hair, touching your skin, rubbing noses

kissing your eyes, being with you, really seeing you


holding heaven's qi

using garuda sparks to grapple with the nagas


"swiping the slate clean

to live and work afresh"


the worms bury us


life is nothing if not invasive

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