This past summer has been a bit of a blood bath. Damage to my bladder from long-ago prostate cancer radiation treatments has left me seeing much more of my own blood, and on a regular basis, than I ever wished to. My journey back to status quo ante (a work in in progress) has included a lot of walking at a gentler pace.
I am grateful to English poet Robert Nisbet, a frequent contributor to Verse-Virtual for his kind comments on my poems in the October issue of Verse-Virtual: "The problem with any poems about personal ailments is that they can so easily cloy, but the linguistic jauntiness of Bob Knox's first poem carries us over all of that risk. And his second poem has a real range and richness."
I have been a contributor to Verse-Virtual, a community of poets that publishes a monthly journal, since 2014 and a contributing editor since 2015.
Here are my two "bloody" poems from the October issue.
Red-Blooded American
Blood inside, blood outside, blood all over
For days it rains red,
messy, sleep-broken, unspeakable, red-basined days
The body on a short leash,
Punishment enough, I thought, for an eon of sins…
Then nothing: no flow, no stream,
no whisper in the cistern of the soul
Just the pain of bone-dry efforts
Burn, burn, the smoke of effort,
no fire of release…
No higher expression
of the body’s deepest need than this:
Gotta pee!
We struggle down to the ER,
dedicated spouse now designated driver –
thank goodness!
Or the impatient patient would have run the lights
through glorious, summer-green, upper-crust Milton,
school-house of presidents,
to a season’s early end.
Succumbing (notices would read) to a deadly combo
of scabs and plasma,
victim of broadly fired radioactive treatments
performed in a prior day
by optimistic clinicians, slightly off-mark
in a crowded neighborhood of organs.
Somebody please, we beg the healers,
free me from this inner strain.
For I am bound upon a wheel of fire,
an old man in a rag of flesh,
who does but slenderly understand what’s bloody up.
Uphill
I walk slowly uphill.
It’s how I do everything.
Something has tipped the world off balance.
Now the sidewalk, the dirt road, the woodland path,
is always trending up.
Strange… I remember thinking tasks completed,
gardens planted:
‘All downhill from here.’
The world is green, a healthy color.
I dream of swapping flesh with the leaves
that swarm the hillside,
pirouetting in the devil-may-care late summer breeze.
But then, in autumn’s termination, all must wither and go under…
Well, yes, in the end, just a question of timing.
The great shade of the forest
stirs music in the minor key.
I will climb these heights,
once more possess such sights
in a theater of the heart.
My feet regain the path,
reclaim their strength, their range of motion,
renew my journey…
both up and down.
And here's a link to the listing of all the poems and articles published in the October issue.
