Devotion

Not a Final Draft

My fifteen-year-old son, with that Zen “beginner’s mind” thing teenagers sometimes stumble into without knowing it has a name, led me straight into a rabbit hole of poetry. Not the scrolling kind of rabbit hole we’re all getting gobbled up by. This one is the kind you fall into and realize you’ve been thirsty for years.

Lately, I’ve been undone and remade in small, difficult, embarrassing ways. Vivid discoveries keep arriving, delivered by watching my kid step deeper into his own becoming. At the same time, I’m dealing with the kind of jolt that makes you look at your body like it’s a borrowed bicycle.

Last week, none of this was on the schedule. Then, suddenly, boom. There you are. Sonnets. Villanelles. Forms with rules so strict they somehow make room for the messiest human truths. I found poems that floored me. I cried from gratitude. I cried from grief. Sometimes both at once.

All of this happened while I was listening to the Fear No Man podcast about Fela Kuti, recommended by a dear friend of mine who is a thoracic surgeon and a serious music lover. The kind of person who can spend the day tinkering with the most fragile parts of our machinery and then drive home with the volume all the way up. I keep picturing it: operating room, transplanting hearts, music loud, hands steady. A day that holds both Fela Kuti, Africa’s most influential musical and sociopolitical force, and the quiet, disciplined violence of keeping someone alive. Talk about hardcore. Talk about devotion.

But I digress.

If I’m being truly forthcoming, I am in some kind of global collapse. The private kind. The kind you try to keep tidy so no one has to look at it. Because we’re taught that vulnerability is a social offense. We’re taught it makes you less magnetic (less income), less worthy, less welcome… and yet kindness and support are exactly what is needed.

And then you hesitate. You don’t want to impose on people who seem happy. You don’t want to toss your storm into someone else’s already-flooded living room. Especially now, when everyone is at peak fucking overload, when the world keeps arriving like a surprise uninvited orange dinner guest with a new disaster and fresh bullshit dripping from its teeth. I don’t need to list it all. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

Then a doctor in surgical scrubs says, hurriedly, like he’s ordering lunch, that his guess is “your cancer is likely Stage IV. Biopsy will confirm.”

Good news: the biopsy did not confirm.

Bad news: it took four days to get the biopsy results back.

Four days is enough time to rearrange your entire relationship with the future.

In fact it’s an eternity. Enough time to grieve the person you assumed you’d be, sitting at dinner with the kids next year. Enough time to watch your mind bargain, sprint, rewrite its own history. Enough time to learn that some people in little green caps need to check their own shit before they smack their lips and drop a sentence that detonates a psyche.

Anyway. That was not fun. Deeply unsettling. Straight-up mortality was not at all on the menu the day before. Then click, the end of having a future, for a minute, was not theoretical. It was right there, breathing in the room with me. Foofta.

And the irony is not lost on me. I've thought of this before, having lost friends a year before a cure for what ailed them was discovered. And now, we live in this age of incredible acceleration where very smart and trustworthy people are saying AI will solve cancer in five years. Medicine en toto will be solved. Five years. Science solved in ten years. A trillion agents, each a genius, working 24/7 on the problems thereof… The universe has jokes, and some of them are crude.

My son is a young man now, which means what I share with him has changed. On the third day of not knowing, the coming apart while hiding started to feel like a lie I was building out of love and fear. So I told him. We cried. The honest kind, where you don’t get to control your face. Actually, he cried. I wailed.

I’m still in very hot water, but my demise is no longer imminent. I can beat this. So instead of preparing to disappear, I’m preparing for a battle. According to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, that means learning the terrain, understanding your enemy, taking stock of weather and timing and resources.

And somehow, one of my resources is poetry.

Handed to me, not by a guru or a professor or some polished self-help algorithm, but by my son.

He’s in his own obsession now. His mother gave him The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and he’s moving through it sort of chronologically, except, as I’ve mentioned before, time doesn’t work the same way for him. He zigzags. He loops. He gets possessed. In between Shakespeare, he’s at the comic book stores hunting rarities and the latest issues, rehearsing for the next Ozzie Fest with his band, and watching his peers perform a modernized 12 Angry Men rewrite. He’s building a life out of curiosities and passions like he’s building a song: one track at a time.

Meanwhile, amongst all the collapsing, I’m watching the scaffolding fall away for my own father. Dementia, fear and poverty, which is a brutal combo. It leaves me staring at the old grief stuck in my bones, that doesn’t even have the decency to be clean.

This is what brought me to the first villanelle most people can name: Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying of the light. Except in my case, it isn’t a poem I’m directing at my father the way Dylan Thomas did his. It’s a poem that seems to be directed at the self as well.

Do not go gentle when a slick doctor with poor life skills tries to reduce you to a chart note and a shrug.

Do not go gentle when the system says at the beginning of every visit “did you bring your insurance card?” Before you are cared for.

Do not go gentle.

Poetry as Solution

Problem-solving is a music producer’s job description, and my life has made me highly skilled in the art of figuring out survival.

Which brings us to kindness.

From a poem, a few lines that keep echoing for me, like they were written into the wall of my chest:

“Before you know what kindness really is, you must lose things…”

“Then, it is only kindness that makes sense anymore.”

I have been close enough to loss lately that I can feel its breath.

But...

“I have death in my pouch. They cannot kill me. I have no fear.”

—Fela Kuti

Life is one breath at a time and I am still grateful for each and every one.

Dig it.

Two quick notes before I go.

1. I want to recommend you hear this: Emma Thompson reading a poem on Augmented Man, a Substack that’s so good it makes me annoyed by everything else that isn’t.

2. If this work helps you stay human in a noisy world, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Paid members support the writing and receive occasional deeper essays, poems, and audio reflections.