By Steve Jones
I wrote this about 8 months ago and wanted to share a part of my long, hard, mentally exhausting road back to sexual health and my New normal after my prostate cancer was removed surgically (Robotic Radical Prostatectomy) in December 2020. I continue to improve and am in a really good place now, thanks to the support of my wife and a few support groups.
Some nights were just really tough. I’d wake in the middle of the night, lie there and just yearn to reach out and initiate but something, often, stopped me. This brings about all sorts of emotions and makes it REALLY hard to sleep. I’d remind myself of the progress but sometimes that just didn’t help. It’s like my mind turns off all the good stuff and just wants to go the sad place, the lost place, the bad place!
I should never have felt lonely lying next to someone who I dearly love and who I have been lying next to every night for 27 years. But some nights I just did!
Lonely Nights
I don’t want to initiate,
I know it won’t be great.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
The old reaction just not there,
I don’t want to prepare.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
The one I love a touch away,
Those failing thoughts just want to stay.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
A touch away is just so far
The mind, when will it remove that scar?
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
My wakened eyes stare in the dark,
Blank Messages just wake and bark.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
I just want my old reaction to move,
I just want that old groove.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
Oh, what does she think of me,
It used to be so free.
Those thoughts are in my head
I’m lonely in my bed.
I yearn to touch, I yearn to feel,
Right now, my mind just wants to reel.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
Lonely is where I’m at right now,
Trying to shift that thought somehow.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
The dark will fade into the night
Will tonight’s fears tomorrow bite?
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
Words bash and crash, around they fly,
Whizzing past my tired mind’s eye.
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
A lonely one again tonight,
Thoughts tomorrow, please be bright!
Those thoughts are in my head,
I’m lonely in my bed.
Get some sleep, tomorrow a new day,
I know that you will find a way.
But those stuck thoughts are in my head,
And I’m lonely and sad in my bed.
(Copyright Stephen Jones 2022)
Steve shared the poem with this blog in response to the Recovering Men global support group meeting on 5 September about “getting through the long dark nights.”
The poem appeared in the Art in the Face of Cancer exhibition in Utah in October 2022. and now you can get a whole book of Steve’s poetry in Words Woke Me
See also The cupboard of intimacy
This is Pratap’s wife.
Lonely Nights truly evokes the bleak landscape of the chain of ruminative thoughts in the night. No matter how, at some corner of awareness one knows this is just the land of thought, still the desolation of those negative trails of rumination hold us in a dreadful lock. The repeated couplets emphasise the chainlike feeling, the cage that seems to have fallen around one’s life. I wanted to say how touched I felt reading Steve’s words and I am very glad that that slough of despond has passed. For myself, I have at times, come downstairs in the small hours, awake and trapped in a similar deadly wheel of thoughts. I knew that putting them down in words on the screen somehow would give a kind of release. I don’t know why the acting of writing helps to heal and draw the sting that hurts but it does for me.
Jeannie
Your poem is beautiful. It is remarkable how the experience of cancer can leave us feeling so alone and isolated, even from a life partner who sleeps next to us in bed. Cancer reminds us perhaps, of death and the loneliness of the subjective existential realization that, in spite of all the love and supports we may have, we still come into and out of this life alone. That being said, it can also wake us to the immense love and beauty of life and nature, and all the things that nurture one’s soul. I think that cancer has the potential for offering a path to greater understandings of ourselves and deeper wisdom. Thank you for sharing your work with us!