Jeff McCallum

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.

Daydreams and Nightmares

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.