Dreampower Artworks

Sometime during this long cold winter, Lisa, my Yaqui traveler friend, called me up and asked, “well, are the bees gone?” She was referring to the distinct image/sensation I had during a couple pipe ceremonies last fall that the tumor was an agitated beehive, and that the smoke from the pipe was lulling them, calming…

I am sitting in an orientation meeting for an exercise program, the joint research project of the local cancer center and the university to determine—I’m not sure what: whether exercise improves our ability to survive cancer? Whether it improves the side effects from cancer like muscle loss, loss of appetite, depression? I am thinking that…

We were minding our own businesson a backroad cruisewhen the wheel began a thumpin’…Don’t you hate bad newswhen your life’s already bumpin’?It ain’t anything you’d choose.We got the flat tire blues.No, this ain’t no ruse—We got the flat tire blues. So we dug out the jack and the pitiful spare;the only thing easy was at…

I am lying on Tanner’s table, needles in my abdomen and lower legs,heat, and this poem, percolating up like a Yellowstone mud pot. Tanner’s hands,not ethereal airy hands, not hands of fire and electricity, not hands of waterbut hands of clay are cradling my cranium, upcurled fingers easing my skulloff its axis where it has…

I don’t need your fears—of suffering, of dying, of the big C,of me being gone and leaving you alone—splattered on me like an uncovered sneeze. I don’t need to feel the quicksand of your anxietysucking the ground from beneath my feet, or elbowing me asideas you push the timing and agenda of your own pressing…

(to be read in that infuriatingly serene and unapproachable voice) If you have brain cancer, please press 1. If you are having a seizure, please press 2 and then throw your phone across the room. (from a distance) Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line for further options. If your hair is…

There lives now a lass with brain cancer.She looks in and without for an answer:Sight, touch, feeling, and sound;Cloud, tree, flower, and ground;she must be some new geomancer. Her laddie continues to fancy her,hold her hand, cut her pills, and romance her.They walk side by side;they’re on the long ride.He’s mastered just how to entrance…

Prepare to merge. Prepare to conflate time, people, and events that we so diligently see as separate and sequential. That is not how the real world works— the world of deep, interdependent, inter-thriving connection. But… But… But what about my own unique identity that I’ve sweated and fretted over for 68 years? What about all…

Cerulean blue spots flash and explode, visible even with my eyes closed as the star trek machine rotates around my head. I am strapped down to the narrow table by the custom-made mesh mask that covers my face. The techies have left the room, but Mick Jagger keeps me company as he wails about the…

He is an old school doctor, a radiation oncologist,very thorough but bound to his script.Well-intentioned and respected, no doubt,but his eyes wander away from mine,and he steps on every one of my lines.I have to interrupt to get a point across.Actually listening, making contactwith the human being sitting across from him—something the nurses do effortlessly—is…