The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Daydreams and Nightmares

Strange thing. My cancer has moved to the other lung, and I am again waiting for it to grow or slow. Four years, three surgeries, and much waiting, yet this time, while I wait I am not so often writing of the illness or the attending cast of characters. I am more, oh, I don't know exactly, more adrift perhaps. More curious about the touch of hand, the brush of my lover's fine, soft hair on my cheek, the wonder of it all. I still wonder how I can help the world be a better place, why I failed at this or that, how to climb at least one more mountaintain or say I love you with every fiber of my being, and of course, I still rant and rave about the world.

When I dream of a home,
it is a house I see,
not a land.

I make assumptions:
there will be no bombs falling in the neighbourhood,
there will be a neighbourhood.
I will be allowed its quiet enjoyment.

I assume it will not be
a cardboard box and yesterday’s newspapers,
or tin walls and a brown, rusting roof,
salvaged from somewhere,
bars on the windows in place of glass.
It will have a bathroom,
more than one.

I do not have this dream because I am living
in a camp for displaced persons
or a FEMA trailer.

I do not have this dream because someone took my house
in a new kind of ethnic cleansing,
whitewashing the eviction with political rhetoric.

I do not have this dream because there are five or twelve or twenty
in a single room with an earthen floor,
or I long to escape the tyranny of my foster home.

I have this dream because I can.
I have this dream because it is as it should be,
here, in America.

If I have this dream,
the time to dream,
the gall to dream,
by what name do I call those who dream for all the reasons I do not?
Assume neither breakfast nor breakfast room.
Dwellers of the realm of the nightmare,
realists, the poor, the victims of war,
brother?

I have this dream because I do not take each day for the gift it is.
They have this dream because some days are not gifts.

Published: October 24, 2007