The fluorescent tubes flicker with a jagged manic bite
while I sit in the plastic chair and wait through the night.
The bleach smell jabs like a needle in the nose—
a sterile kind of purgatory that every patient knows.
I’ve been a walking tomb for six months and a day,
watching muscle after muscle slowly melt and slide away.
The doctor enters with a stride that lacks the usual weight,
carrying the heavy manila folder of my fate.
He drops the stack of documents upon the stainless steel,
revealing the impossible that I’m struggling to feel.
The predator has vanished from the darkness of the lung.
The final bell of agony has finally been rung.
The ink is dry and beautiful, the data is a shield—
the harvest of the sickness has been burned within the field.
I scan the rows of Latin and the cold computer font,
seeking out the parasite that used to take exactly what it wants.
Where the scans once bloomed with rot, a thick and spreading dark,
now there’s nothing but the vacancy, a clean and hollow mark.
My pulse is like a hammer on the anvil of my chest—
a violent celebration ringing out the end of my arrest.
I think about the woman waiting in the parking lot,
sobbing for the future that we thought we hadn’t got.
I’ll walk out through the sliding doors and feel the damp night air,
pulling out the IV tape and the sensor from my hair.
I’m breathing in the oxygen of a world that’s wide and new.
The thing has packed its bags and left the bone and sinew.
She opens her arms and I fall into them like a man returned—
we hold each other in the parking structure, unburned.
I’ll take her on the hood of the car beneath the streetlamp glare,
feeling every inch of living and the way she pulls my hair.
No more counting milligrams or the minutes of the sleep.
We’ve got a stupid amount of time that we’re allowed to keep.
The tragedy is canceled, all that blackness was a lie—
I’m staring at the heavens with a wide and steady eye.
I’m more than just a tally in a ledger of the ill.
I’m a man who’s got the hunger and I’m a man who has the will.
Let the engine scream its fury, let the tires burn the road.
I’m shedding every ounce of this heavy terminal load.