Strong to the Finish

 I wrote this poem a few weeks ago for my creative writing class. But I also wrote it...because I needed to.

Strong to the Finish

“Olive….Popeye…Bluto.”

Pale petal lips whisper the names

to the humid darkness.

The flickering flash of those black and white caricatures,

glimmers across glossy diamond-blue eyes,

fixed like sunken pebbles into ghost-pale gaunt flesh.

Slumped in the strong, sad arms of her weary mother,

I am utterly helpless, and I feel a fool,

my head puffed up with fancy medical words

that cannot begin to wrap their starched tongue around

such sacred and tender sorrow,

that oozes a guttering flame of desperate hope,

boldfaced and delicate in the face of

such monstrous, frigid, ruthless judgment:

“less than three percent survival rate.”

And at that moment,

all I wish for is a can of magical green stuff

that a certain sailor carries in his back pocket,

to push through that slinky IV tube,

like an emerald river of strength;

to pulse a puff of spring

into a dying body made of winter.