Poetry by Jerry Fishman
I entered the grand hall
At Midnight.
All the dancing cancer cells were there.
So many glowing green globular ones with lively, enticing, trailing tendrils.
And blue ones. And doubleglobed pinkish back ones with many fine and delicate tendrils.
And others dark green in patches.
All were whirling under the light flecks racing o’er the walls
And dom-ed ceiling.
I took a ravishing green cancer cell
by a tender tendril.
And she? floating a bit off the lovely dark wood floor.
She whirled with me to Danse Macabre.
The music so heart-hopping lively.
So stirring.
So full of the rhythm of black and lonely outer space.
The green lady cell wrinkled and folded and expanded and shrank.
Oh she whirled so deliriously
And I holding her dear tendril
Ignoring her malignant nature.
Threw myself wholeheartedly into the music that dashed on madly.
We twirled in this crowd of humans and cancer cells at the
Malignancy Ball
It was so waltzy and moving
This Danse Macabre music.
I lost all awareness of my human traits. The beat fell into the lower register and then picked up the high notes once more.
On and on we danced in the vast hall
Beneath the whirling lights.
And the waltz like rhythm bounced on and on.
At times the beat slowed and became a bit sad
As if to point out the deathiness of the non-human dancers.
Now it speeded up and horn like sounds reverberated throughout the magnificent, sparkling hall.
And there a human dancer
Holding the strands of a great green patchy cancer cell
whirled past us.
It was Edgar—his eyes ablaze.
He was wrapped in the stygian glory of the ravendark hall.
The velvety, vast and ornate-columned hall.
The spacious chamber
So ideal for
The Malignancy Ball.
Edgar’s somberness
So neatly fit the mad,
ravengloominess of the
Malignancy Ball.
New clanging sounds amid the waltz like music---louder and louder.
Racing all of us around in maddened circles.
Dancing without end.
The waltzy music heated up.
And vast and violent clanging sounds
Filled the spacious, gloomdelightful hall.
A pause in the racing music.
Violins coming out of the pause.
And all the cancer cells and their dancing human partners
slowed down.
We made sad motions to the violins.
And now my green and deadly partner tightened her tendril grip on my wrist.
Coddling me closer and closer.
Pushing her jelliness toward my mouth and eyes.
Seeking some dark and dangerous, some amorous pathological embrace.
Some sweet and deadly
kiss of death.
And so the hidden giant clock
Boomed out One AM
As the music quieted and stopped and the cancer cells drew their partners in And in and in . . . . .
for deadly sweet kisses,
My green and glowing dance partner
Sluiced me close, close,
Closer still.
Until at last I succumbed.
Sinking into her jelliness , , ,
Engulfed, absorbed . . . .
Human no more,
My last human thought,
“I am dying, engulfed amid a whirling waltz . . . . .
How baroque!”
And then I was suffused, ingested, jellified
At the finale of the
Malignancy Ball.
Seduced to ingelsinuous gooiness.
And found myself gurgling,
Gurgling into Unbeing . . .
