Samuel Tongue

I know how to build a survival shelter from fallen tree branches, packed mud, and pulled moss.

I could survive forever on death alone.

Wasn't it death that taught me to stop measuring my lifespan by length, but by width?

Do you know how many beautiful things can be seen in a single second?

How you can blow up a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it?

I'm infinite, I know, but I still have a measly wrinkle collection compared to my end goal.

I would love to do a before picture, I think, as I look in the mirror and mistake my head for the moon.

My dark thoughts are almost always 238,856 miles away from me believing them.

I love this life, I whisper into my doctor's stethoscope so she can hear my heart.

My heart, an heirloom I didn't inherit until I thought I could die.

Why did I go so long believing I owed the world my disappointment?

Why did I want to take the world by storm when I could have taken it by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers on the side of the road where I broke down?

I'm not about to waste more time spinning stories about how much time I'm owed, but there is a man who is usually here who isn't today.

I don't know if he's still alive.

I just know his wife was made of so much hope, she looked like a firework above his chair.

Will the afterlife be harder if I remember the people I love, or forget them?

Either way, please let me remember.

Obviously, when we're approaching poems that deal with or try to deal with cancer and disease in this way, we are covering a lot of ground that has been covered before.

There are many people now, and obviously we're living longer with more and more illnesses.

So writing about cancer and somebody's experience of living with