Candies For The Cancered

Telling a world on fire

there’s light at the end of the tunnel

is the kind of optimism

that smells like gasoline.

It’s handing candies

to a man dying of cancer

and calling it healing —

sweet, sterile,

and sold out in glossy packaging.

We’ve mistaken hope for heroin,

kept injecting it into the veins of rotting flesh

and called the tremors “faith.”

Every prayer is a denial of diagnosis,

every sermon, a sugarcoated placebo.

Fairytales don’t heal pandemics, 

they just teach corpses

how to smile through rigor mortis.

Truth isn’t a sunrise in soft pastels.

It’s a reptilian scalpel;

cold, necessary,

and cutting through comfort.

And as long as we don't cut it open

and as long as we don't let the bad blood bleed out dry

the world will stay an ever-growing malignancy

because we were too scared to pull the scabs and the clots out

because we were told healing should look holy

because we were convinced scaffolding could fix the rot in the iron

because it’s easier to write love letters to melancholy

than admit

we’re dying

of cancer.