cancer poem #2

	a snail carries its house on its back
& on its back are all our houses—
	it’s snails all the way down

	i thought it was turtles said someone
no—that’s only in anecdotes
	we’re living the endtime

condors & cormorants have birdhood in common
california & eldorado have gold

it’s the presence of eyes that perceives
but the absence of sight comprehends

	yet as the table rises you sit to your meal alone & aloof at the soundoff
taking your time to enjoy the repast & limit the time in the gutter
a yellow bird as small as a palm sits in your palm as it sings
        oceans of fishes gather at sundown to offer their guts for your ailment

Author of the article

Ed Go is a Chinese-Filipino-Portuguese-English-Scottish-Irish American writer raised in Massachusetts, Virginia, Alaska, Hawaii and Connecticut. A former video store clerk, school bus driver, CDL driving instructor, garbage truck driver, exterminator, phone book deliverer, mystery shopper, and lead singer/guitar-player in a punk-folk band, Ed Go currently lives and works as a teacher in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in various print and online journals and anthologies, and his chapbook Deleted Scenes from the Autobiography of Ed Go as told by Napoleon Id was published in 2014 by Other Rooms Press, and “new machines,” a sequence of twenty-one prose poems in the anthology Urgent Bards in 2016 by Urbantgarde Press. Read more on his blog.