Zen Lunatic, Thanksgiving

I won't tell you his name, but I'll tell you that he is the keeper of memories, the soul of kindness, a beatnik, a jazz buff, a man who's been to war. He remembers where he was when Kerouac died and where I was when he called me to tell me about it. He remembers visiting my widowed father and riding the subway home to keep him company. He remembers what it was like to be crazy just for fun and he knows that the times got sober and so he got saner with them.
We had dinner in Miami Beach tonight, some little jazz club on Lincoln. He's taking care of his sweetheart, wondering about his friends. He lives in a tiny flat in an old building on the beach. He asks about my daughter, my dog, my woods, my worries. He's totally there and he says that he thought he'd never see me again and damn, ain't it great? And he says it, not so's I'll agree with him, but so he can be sure that I'll feel it myself.
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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I'll be giving thanks. Hey, it would be crazy not to.

Hard to Believe

Yesterday, around dinner time, I realized that the day had slipped past me-lived in a fog of ordinariness as if I had all the time in the world. The magic feeling of radiation days had slipped away. 

So this morning, I walked very slowly in the woods, off the trail, spent extra time petting the dog, talking to the naturalist who showed me where to look for the winter wrens. You can only count on cancer to keep you alive for a while and when the magic wears off, you gotta do it yourself. 

Speaking Freely

For a few days now, I've been pacing with a typescript in hand reading slowly and over-enunciating some poems that I planned to read at Musehouse on Friday . It's a group reading and my mentor there asked me to join the group.
There were about ten readers. (do I dare call us poets?) Five men, middle-aged and up and five women, early twenties and down. The men read about loss and mortality and doubts, the women read about love and family and the excitement of finding a self. Better yet, two friends showed up just to give me some friendly faces to address.
Two surprises: I got through the poems without much trouble although the enforced slowness may have changed the message a bit, it was kind of fun to leave my Brooklyn pace behind and pretend I was a Mississippi Yankee for a change.
The other surprise was what good entertainment it turned out to be. The ideas were provocative and the readers very personable. Compared to most nights at the theatre or music venue, it was comfortable, congenial and free.

Today, I see that another poem has been published it's about getting well in the modern world. I find myself wondering what that poem would have sounded like if I weren't one of the lucky ones with private insurance.