Survivor*

*This is, to my knowledge, the only poem that my father ever wrote.  I found it, by chance, on the day of his memorial service, and read pieces of it there.  I've posted it here in entirety so that his words will survive with his legacy.

Survivor

I am a survivor.

No, I don’t mean that god-awful reality show,

That insipid blight upon an already empty intellectual wasteland.

I am a survivor.

I survived gym class in elementary school,

A fat, non-athletic kid who couldn’t climb that stupid fucking rope if

A dozen Dobermans had been chasing me. 

I survived my parents’ fights,

The relentless screaming, accusations, and recriminations,

Can’t you see we’re standing here,

Looking, crying, waiting for this to stop,

It’s kind of ironic…that little boy in the rocking chair watching the Three Stooges,

And outside the window his mother is walking away, suitcase in hand, the father pleading her to come back.  You did, but I can’t forget.

I survived junior high.

My body became “athletic” without surrendering to the mentality.

An adolescent hippie that understood the world and desperately

Needed the world to understand me

I survived high school.

I had an epiphany.  There was a middle class,

But it wasn’t us.  There wasn’t going to be any college,

I had an epiphany.  I understood the grayness that enveloped my father

And waited for it to envelope me.

I survived my marriage…barely.

In a life devoid too often of joy,

It gave me three little salvations…and hope.

Because children are that.  You see, you can’t really die

If part of you is left to remember.

And my childhood was not going to be my children’s,

But you can die if it’s ripped away from you.

You heartless fucking bitch…where is the person I knew?

I survived 25 years in that awful factory,

I saw the faces of men, gray and grimy as the machines

They became part of, and I realized that was my face too,

That it was hard to tell where the machine ended and I began.

A monotony of sound, sights, smells, and actions. 

A cold world with a faceless master in a counting house

Awaiting his own Christmas ghosts. 

I survived that doctor visit and all the ensuing ones,

I survived hearing the words…cancer, stage 2….

I survived the uncertainty, because, well…it’s cancer.

I survived the fear, my own and that of my loved ones.

I survived the needles, the pain, the chemicals that would “heal” me,

the way my skin felt ravaged, stretched and  abused.

And the betrayal of my body

until I became a fat non-athletic old man.

But I’m a survivor.