Big Woman & Perk.

I is a one letter word

I felt the soft, innocent, blush petals as

I placed another flower on your bedside table,

The sea of their colors brightening the room.

To protect your droopy eyes from

The gloomy shadows of machines and men in white coats

I looked at you,

I felt your pain,

I felt for you,

I felt my own pain,

The pain of having to see a beautiful person be torn apart

And I felt for us

Us is a two letter word

Our dozens of empty jello cups,

Our laughs when the doctors voice would crack one too many times,

Our empty smiles that appeared but had no meaning behind them,

When visitors would talk to us

And made us still believe there was and will always be an us,

We felt a little love in the pills and Dixie cups

That let us be us.

That let me love you.

You is a three letter word

The way your hope shown through crow lines by your eyes,

And the way your furrowing lips were a kiss to my heart

Showed me that you were strong.

I saw in you a kind of tenacity,

A courageous vigor so full with conviction

That nothing was going to tear you from me.

Nothing in all the many discoveries of science

Would keep us apart.

No amount of words in the English language

Were going to drive our love astray.

Love is a four letter word

Love is everything we ever did together,

Love is when you got diagnosed with a lesson in misery,

The same misery we stand hand in hand everyday conquering

The hand of hardships you got dealt

And every day is a new card that we play

The cards of your life we hold our very faith in.

Faith is a five letter word.

I saw faith in the letters people wrote you every day,

And in the dozens of roses and hydrangeas clouding the melancholy room,

Faith followed you in every MRI, X-Ray, and blood lab.

And faith filled me every time a man in a long white coat strolled up to me,

His clipboard in hand detailing my fate.

I still held faith the first time I heard “Rick” and “Cancer” in the same sentence.

Cancer is a six letter word.

But Cancer can’t be spelled without can.

And we can make it through,

if you are willing to continue to hold my hand,

And conquer any mutation that dare to tear us a part.

And I can and intended to spend the rest of my life

Making billions of other words for you and I.