When he was your age,
John Prine
got the very same kind of cancer.
It's time to start writing songs, I said.
You're a survivor now.

You smirked at me from behind that guitar,
and the smirk said
"Don't you know
about dreamers and doers?
Dreamers don't become doers overnight."

And having always been a doer,
I feebly said, "Bullshit,"
and the smirk just kept on smirking.

And you, so sad behind that evil smirk,
did not hear this conversation.
Holding your guitar
so thin
so thin

as thin as you were
when I
when my mother
when I
married you.

(March 2002)