Bad To the Bone Marrow (or) The Incredible Journey of the Silver Surfer

BAD TO THE BONE MARROW
or THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY OF THE SILVER SURFER

for Walter Lewallen


In this poem my friend has cancer--
Mantle Cell Lymphoma stage four.
Death has come with its little pouch
of wonder, its parasite cancers, come
to take my friend away. I say no to Death,
I say this friend has taught me to live
and you
are too early here. We have things to do,
things to say. I need this friend. Please.

In this poem a child psychologist
tells my friend
he needs to remember the childhood hero
that fought evil and won, the strongest
of the strong,
and he tells me of the Silver Surfer,
straight from the days of comic books
and cotton candy,
the childhood we tried to have.

In this poem my friend becomes the child
he needs to be
to believe that stories are real
and can change the world. He imagines
three times a day his hero doing battle
with the cancer, for in this poem
the Silver Surfer becomes small--
perhaps by some science fictive device
that shrinks him for this purpose--
and he goes into my best friend's blood,
he rides the blood right to the bone,
slides inside, then on to the melon-sized
growths, all those confused cells,
he is small
he penetrates membranes and calls upon
the Power Cosmic to heal what is broken.
Of course, there are setbacks,
he barely makes it,
his struggle against this evil
is the most challenging
and frightening thing he's ever faced,
the universe is at stake after all,
his universe, the one poem
he is writing with his life,
already long enough
and complete
but, please, God, please
let it be longer.


Richard Smyth

Posted over on Anabiosis Press