David Roth
Manuel Garcia a proud youthful father,
was known on his block as a hard-working man
With a wife and a family, a job and a future,
he’d everything going according to plan
One day Manuel Garcia, complaining of stomach pains,
went to the clinic to find out the cause
His body was found to have cancerous tissue,
ignoring the order of natural laws
So Manuel Garcia, of Milwaukee County,
checked into the medical complex in town
Suddenly seeing his 39 years like the
sand in an hourglass plummeting down
“What are my choices,” cried Manuel Garcia.
“You’ve basically two,” was the doctor’s decree,
“Your cancer untreated will quickly be fatal,
but treatment is painful with no guarantees.”
And so it began, Manuel’s personal odyssey,
long sleepless nights in a chemical daze
With echoes of footsteps down long lonely corridors,
tolling his minutes and hours away
With the knowledge that something inside was
consuming him, Manuel Garcia was filled with despair
He’d already lost 40 pounds to the cancer,
and now to the drugs he was losing his hair.
After nine weeks in treatment the doctor
came calling, said, “Manuel we’ve done about all we can do.
Your cancer could go either way at this juncture.
It’s out of our hands and it’s now up to you.”
He looked in the mirror a sad frightened stranger,
so pale so wrinkled, so lonely, so scared
Diseased, isolated, and feeling unlovable,
126 pounds and no hair
He dreamed of his Carmen at 60 without him,
his four little children not having their dad
Of Thursday night card games at Julios and
everything else he’d not done that he wished that he had.
Awakened from sleep on the day of his
discharge by shuffling feet going all round his bed
Manuel opened his eyes and thought he
was still dreaming, his wife and four
friends with no hair on thier heads
He blinked and he looked again not quite
believing, the four shiny heads all lined
up side by side
And still to that point not a word had been
spoken, but soon they were laughing so hard
that they cried
The hospital hallways were ringing with voices,
“Patron, we did this for you,” said his friends
And they wheeled him out to the car they had
borrowed, “Amigo, estamos contigo, ves.”
So Manuel Garcia returned to his neighborhood,
dropped off in front of his two bedroom flat
And the block seemed unusually deserted for Sunday.
He drew a deep breath and adjusted his hat
But before he could enter, the front door flew open.
Manuel was surrounded by faces he knew
50-odd loved ones and friends of the family with
clean-shaven heads and the words, “We love you.”
So Manuel Garcia a victim of cancer, a father,
a husband, a neighbor, a friend
With a lump in his throat, said, “I’m not one
for speeches, but here I have something that
needs to be said.
I felt so alone with my baldness and cancer.
Now you stand beside me, thank Heaven above.
For giving me strength that I need may
God bless you, and long may we live with
the meaning of love.
For giving me strength that I need may
God bless you, and long may we live with
the meaning of love
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