With a brush and ink

I paint a lake

Some times all it takes

Is a walk around the lake

To ease your mind

All it takes

Is a walk 

'Round the lake

Late at night

I'll stay up and write

A book about my life...

...So no one would ever make

All of my mistakes

Well, I've made my loved ones cry right in front of my eyes

And I've spent so long hurting

In such a short life

But I'm moving on

My heart is grown

I'm moving on

Yes, I'm moving on

My heart is grown

I'm moving on

Sometimes it's all it takes

Is a walk around the lake

Oh, and sometimes it's all it takes

Is a walk

'Round the lake

Half past nowhere

alone

in the crumbling

tower of myself

stumbling in this the

darkest

hour

the last gamble has been

lost

as I

reach

for

bone

silence.

As the mountains melt together with the sunrise

You tell me about the time

When you turned yourself into a stranger,

And all the chemicals were dancing in your blood

When you dear suddenly felt seasick.

Because you thought all lies were revealed.

And the thing that I felt when you told me

About that house with that singing weathervane

Oh, determined heart please translate it!

These cryptic messages hidden in between,

Her moon and her sky and her oceans

Cause I don't seem to understand them anymore.

Now the bachelor seems to wind up in the corner.

And his army of lovers they have left.

And the breakman is obviously sleeping.

Cause this train is going faster than light.

I sit on the edge of a cataclysmic abyss

Straddling the horizon

As sand dissipates under my feet

And I dream of falling

Show me

Show me how it’s done

This tired face too pale

These tired feet don’t know where they are headed

Show me

Show me how it’s done

This troubled mind needs rest

This aching heart needs more than you can offer

I’m playing with a dangerous flame again

And i’m happy as I can be when you are gone

I’m playing with a dangerous flame again

And i’m happy as I can be when you are gone, gone, gone, gone

Show me

Show me how it’s done

This tired face too pale

These tired feet don’t know where they are headed

Show me

Show me how it’s done

Invisible wars

You and I

Still acting like we’re strangers

I’m playing with a dangerous flame again

I think i’m happy as I can be when you are gone

I’m playing with a dangerous flame again

And i’m happy as I can be when you are gone

I’m playing with a dangerous flame again

And i’m happy as I can be when you are gone, gone, gone, gone

Have you ever felt like you were on auto pilot? 

Watching from behind your own eyes. 

Not feeling or hearing a thing. 

Everything purely isn’t from habit and ritual. 

You watch as the world passes by without compassion. 

Screaming loudly but no one hears.

Muffled by your own pain reaching out silently 

for someone to understand and help you cope. 

Like throwing a ball in the air and expecting someone to catch, 

you fall with no where to land. 

Nothing to soften the harsh blow. 

The damage is too far gone. 

Now Im numb beyond anything I thought possible. 

There is no heart that beats in my chest, 

it has been replaced with the cancer of pain. 

Slowly eating me alive. 

Everything carries a darkness, 

all roads leading to somewhere depressing and full of pain. 

Words bleed from my finger tip trying to find some solitude 

in pouring out how I feel. 

Someone has to ease this pain.

You covinence yourself to live each day to the fullest,

Following out the cliche of your own experience.

You hide your fear from your family and tell your friends one truth,

"the prognosis is relatively good."

The others you don't say.

Sometimes the heaviness of hope gets to you

And what you need most is to feel the purity of fear

To let it burn out the details of your day to day life.

You live in this underworld, 

You now let yourself know, 

Here with fear and with a loss

That cannot be compensated.

You know this is a private underworld

And that to talk of it too much might destroy something, 

But sometimes hope's burden is too much,

And what you crave more than some sign of perpetual life

Is the clarity to say things as they really are.

Keep climbing into my head without knockin'

And you fix yourself there like a map pin

On this ghost of this street where i'm livin'

I'm in a chrysalis and i'm snowed in

Darling, darling that dam's gonna give

It's inevitable the way that you live

Bottles in brown paper and a mouth that slurs

All the shit that it stirs

Let that dogwood blossom

There'll be hell to pay in heaven

For you take every street home

What happens when you're into deep to break

Loneliness keeps you constantly awake

What happens when the passage of time appears 

You see yourself as a child and it brings you to tears

You say that you're troubled and you always have been

Uncomfortable in your own skin

So you contemplate the riverbed

Turn off the dark thoughts in your head

Darling, darling that dam's gonna give

It's inevitable the way that you live

Bottles in brown paper and a mouth that slurs

All the shit that it stirs

Let that dogwood blossom

There'll be hell to pay in heaven

For you take every street home

Today, I’m writing from a hospital bed in Seattle. I’m in the bone marrow transplant unit, where this week I’ve undergone intensive chemotherapy treatments in anticipation of receiving stem cells. In the year since my diagnosis, I’ve struggled to hold onto a sense of who I am while I watch the person in the mirror change.

Looking back, I call the first month after my diagnosis “the cancer bubble” because I wasn’t showing obvious signs of my disease. I looked about the same — maybe a little more tired and pale than usual, but a stranger could never have guessed that I carried a secret, deep in my bones.

In the oncology ward, I still felt invisible, flying under the radar with my mouse hair. In the waiting room at my second appointment, a man with a sleeveless shirt and a bandanna covering his hairless head leaned in toward my father, who’s been bald since the ’80s, and raised his fist in the air: “Live strong, brother,” he said. Later, my dad and I had a good laugh about the mix-up — it helped ease our tight nerves for a moment. But I remember also feeling slighted, as though my terrible new disease wasn’t being acknowledged.

I remember my first day of chemo as if it were yesterday. Within a few weeks, my waist had shrunk to a double zero — the size it was when I was in the sixth grade. My cheek bones jutting out. Rings under my eyes. Skin the color of chalk. And then there was my hair. My long, wavy hair — the same unruly locks I’d spent countless hours fussing over in front of a bathroom mirror — soon to be gone.

When I finally returned home after my five-week hospitalisation, I could feel the stares of strangers on my bald head and thinning eyebrows. Everywhere I went, cancer spoke for me before I could say the first word. Once, I even overheard a child asking her mother why there was did that boy have no hair.

Cancer had given me a reverse celebrity status: all the attention for something you didn’t want to be known for. I had crossed over into a new land, the land of Patient. And with every step I was feeling less like Zack.

Now, here in the bone marrow unit, where I’m required to be in isolation to prevent infections, I’m surrounded 24/7 by the gaze of people who, first and foremost, are concerned with what I have — not necessarily who I am. Doctors in face masks stand over my hospital bed, peering down at me. Eyes and ties. And white lab coats. Voices without mouths discuss me as if I weren’t in the room. They give the Patient a hospital gown. The Patient is talked at, looked at, probed, prodded and whispered about. But after all, it’s their job to see me as Patient. The goal is to cure the Patient so he can return to being himself. But until then, it’s hard not to feel like just a body.

As Patient, you cede control of a lot of your life to others — to your nurses and doctors, to their decisions and schedules. I’m thankful for their care — where would I be without it? But anyone who’s been in the role of Patient can attest to the way it changes how you see yourself.

As I wait for my cure, I’m still a Patient. And while it’s been only a year, I can hardly remember what not being one is like.

The cancerous cell

Turns a page and then another page.

It can't put the book down. It reads

Faster and faster. It will read

Through the night until the story 

Is finished. The doctor says

Don't worry, we have ways to cure

Its obsession, stop it from going on, turn

It towards a different ending, its own.

The book of your body won't be

Read in a single night, in a few

Months, in a year. It will go on and on

Like an epic, until it has exhausted

Itself, and all possibilities, with its 

Knowledge, until it has taken in 

Enough worlds to become a universe.

Every time I look at you it hurts

Lover, lover, lover you are

Guiding us out of the woods

Lover, lover, lover you are

Are a north star, burning

She shifts her weight to the other foot

Asks me how deep I'd like the cut

Sharpening her words

He kicks out the door wedge

And walks her to the ledge

Points out to the ocean

I hear that you're living in, that house out by the lake

Things that fall together, just as easily break

I'm not looking back though

Lover, lover, lover you are

Guiding us out of the woods

Lover, lover, lover you are

Are a north star, burning

We wrestle with the tide

'Til there was nowhere to hide

Laid bare on the rocks

Things came into focus sharp

With the morning came a spark

That lit the fuse for sorrow

I hear that you're living in, that house out by the lake

Somewhere down the road, beside you I wish to wake

I'm not looking back though

Lover, lover, lover you are

Guiding us out of the woods

Lover, lover, lover, you are

Are a north star, lover

Lay your head, on the river bed

The tears we shed, gonna burst the bank

Lover, lover, lover you are

Guiding us out the woods

Lover, lover, lover you are

Guiding us out of the woods

Lover, lover, lover you are

Are a north star, turning

When she told me

On that morning

In the hospital 

How beautiful I was, 

Lit from the inside,

I whispered back,

"I only became beautiful

When I began to die."

The sound of nurses, 

Some with wings, 

Some thumped and banged,

Attentive, tuned, listening for the god,

The doctor, the savior,

The brisk clip of his footstep,

The bevy at his heels.

He did not look at me

But fussed around the bed,

That high altar where I lay 

In pain, waiting, waiting, for reports.

Under this roof of rectangular things: the motorized bed; electrical outlets; metallic IV machines, clicking and humming - the only things oddly shaped are the people hanging from bags of chemotherapy. The bed ridden person must push a red button for a nurse to come: "Nurse, I can't breathe. Nurse, I have anger. Nurse, let me die." In the bathroom, where urine is carefully measured, a beaded string can be pulled for help, the spaced plastic beads like a cheap childhood rosary. There'd be surprisingly little to watch from the sky. Nurses run in and out. Patients are patients or not. Doctors are caring or not (even a hello will cost seventy five dollars). The hallways are oval., like a high school track. The nurses go on rounds and wake you with anti-fungal mouth medications, racks of test tubes and blood pressure cuffs. The thermometer beeps when it decides your temperature. You never get used to the way veins constrict during pressure checks; never get used to the endless line of needles: blood oxygen pricks on hands, IVs inserted  into arm and chest, blood drawings inside elbows, huge bone marrow needles in the hip bones. ( "next time you stick that stake in me, damn well make sure I'm unconscious.") You might as well be an appliance plugged to the wall, each five days of chemotherapy. Move, the alarms go off. Unplug yourself; alarms go off. The chemotherapy drips, clicks, hums into veins. The anti nauseas fog you up. Thirty days in the bone marrow unit and you never leave the room. You study the crack in the hospital ceiling, the one that looked like a rabbit; play with the blue paper mask the nurse gives you. You turn the mask into a tent, a bedpan, a bow tie, a beret, a moth, a kidney. You could starve yourself; put a photo of your loved one by the bed. Once a day, the nurse unhooks you from the IV to shower, covers your chest with plastic wrap, then leaves. You always take longer than you need in the water - stay under its pulse; rinse off the strange chemical smells you emit. And after you step out, drying slowly, and peeling the plastic from under arm and over nipple, you try to cover the hospital's smell with baby powder, change to a fresh white gown. You could walk to the bed, call the nurse, say I'm ready to be re-hooked now, but never do. There are whole minutes when you keep the door closed and walk to every corner of the room, not connected to anything.

I have never loved someone the way I love you

I have never seen a smile like yours

And if you grow up to be queen, or clown, or pauper

I will say you are my favorite one in town

I have never held a hand so soft and sacred

When I see you laugh, I know heaven's key

And when I grow to be a poppy in the graveyard

I will send you all my love upon the breeze

And if the breeze won't blow your way, I will be the sun

And if the sun won't shine your way, I will be the rain

And if the rain won't wash away all your aches and pains

I will find some other way to tell you you're okay

You're okay 

Out of that sterilised chamber: the butterfly

Doors swung open and I stepped into air

That six weeks earlier could have killed me.

I'm worried that thinking about cancer,

Writing about cancer, will start cancer

Growing again inside me. 

Where is that sweet void, 

Where in the wide heavens,

Could it be hiding?

There's a painter who stares at miles of white all around

Each colour he's dreamed is lost in thought and can't be found

Takes a walk through his head to ask his friends if they'd come out

Come out from your shells, come chat with me and walk around...

What's stopping us?

Wake up from your sleep, they're only dreams not solid ground...

You'd keep your eyes closed if you had known what i have found

Can you blame me for not wanting both feet on the ground 

While you follow routine and waste your days i am in the clouds, 

Raining down

Who are you darling to turn me to stone?

You open my eyes but break all my bones,

Now you want to be together after so many years alone?

Sing a song of sweetnes or a melody of hope,

When a lump leaves my pants and lands in my throat,

How can two hands be tied without any rope.

Now Im always away,

But its you Im thinking of,

I was walking around stoned before your sobering love.

Now I had a dream for your soft paper hands,

The left one would carry my wedding band,

The right one would always be reaching for the man...

This is no home, though it may be your house,

There was many of times I'd rather slept than kiss your mouth,

And I figured we can make it if I can figure you out...

Now Im always away,

But its you Im thinking of,

I was walking around stoned before your sobering love.

My true love has left me,

I sigh and I slouch,

Up to the fridge then back to the couch,

I want to believe but theres so much doubt

I told you then, when we was just teens,

I'd rather be in your heart, 

Then be in your jeans.

I guess I always am, but only in dreams.

Now Im always away,

But its you Im thinking of,

I was walking around stoned before your sobering love.

If I ever stayed, I'd thank the lord above,

For turning my heart back toward a drunken love.

If I dream in darkness 

Would I sleep to die? 

Erase the silence 

There is no need for it 

Cause I am swallowed from 

The sound of my screaming.

Without a soul 

Without a thought I know that I’m going to die here 

Don’t let me die here in the darkness 

There must be something more 

Erase my life 

There is nothing left of me 

I’m burning in the blacken ashes of nothingness 

In the end 

I noticed how I long 

For the deep sleep dream

Of silence.

Until we have brushed up against mortality, life seems boundless. Cancer sometimes cures this strange nearsightedness, this dance of hesitations. By exposing life's brevity, a diagnosis of cancer can restore life's true flavour. 

A few weeks after my diagnosis, I had the odd feeling a veil had been lifted that until then had dimmed my sight. One Sunday afternoon, in the small, sunny room of your apartment, I was lounging opposite to you. Focused and peaceful, you were lying on the couch bathing in the afternoon sun. For the first time, I saw you as you  were, without wondering whether I should prefer someone else. I simply saw the lock of hair that slipped gracefully forward when you leaned your head, the delicacy of your fingers gently grasping the pages of the paper. I was surprised that I had never noticed how touching the slightest contractions of your jaw could be when you had trouble organising your week ahead. I suddenly saw you as yourself, apart from any questions and doubt. Your presence became incredibly moving. Simply being allowed to witness that moment came to me as an immense privilege. 

Try to picture lying there,

Helpless deep in pain

Try to picture dying there

Chasing all your fears in vain

Try to picture dreaming deep

Dreaming in a hospital bed

Try to picture not waking from sleep

While visions of life run through your head

Try to picture all the days

You'd walk with pain and such

Try to picture all the ways

How the pain could hurt this much

Try to picture being me

And striving for each day

Try to picture, just try to see

Not knowing if you'd die today.