Dear Squam, with my compliments and my suspicions.

I did not know your name the day you first came calling,
you moved in soft as Sunday lace, while somewhere thunder started falling.
I thought you were a symptom, just a thing my body made,
some private little warning sign that might politely fade.

Bless your little DNA, Squam, you mutation dressed in charm,
you slipped in like a velvet harpoon and taught my body harm.
Buddy, that was too much sugar for a dime, and I learned it mighty late,
because by the time I knew your name, you were already past the gate.

Penile squamous cell carcinoma—Lord, what a name to meet,
a mouthful full of terror with the rug pulled from my feet.
I had heard of cancer all my life, but not this hidden kind,
not the one that finds a man where stigma and silence bind.

I wanted to find one man who had walked this road before,
someone to say, “I know this room you landed in, I know that closing door.”
But rare cancers make rare rooms where few living witnesses remain,
and I faced the knife without a guide through that private, unholy pain.

I searched for a voice that sounded like mine, scared but still alive,
a man who had crossed that burning bridge and learned how to survive.
But all I found was silence, Squam, and silence has its teeth,
so I walked alone toward surgery with fear tucked underneath.

Partial penectomy came first, as if “partial” softened steel,
as if fractions make a gentler grief, as if math can bargain with what you feel.
But the body knows what language hides, and the mirror knows what’s true,
and I woke up with less of myself because I had survived you.

For two short weeks, I tried to breathe, tried to call that freedom mine,
tried to believe the storm had passed and I had crossed some finish line.
Then came the main event, Squam, the words with no soft floor:
full penectomy, groin and inguinal nodes, and then still more.

There are rooms where dignity is folded like a gown across a chair,
where you learn to be examined by strangers trying not to stare.
There are phrases said so gently they can crush a car in two:
“Do you mind if we take a look?”—as if I had any choice but to.

And still I stood there, shaken, Southern manners still intact,
Scottish blade in the sock, eyes wide open, learning fact by fact.
The Stoics never promised pain would ask before it came,
only that a man may choose his posture somewhere in the flame.

You thought my love and I would lose our footing on this altered, unfamiliar land,
but buddy, she and I are learning, step by step and hand in hand.
We are building a new language where touch is patient, brave, and true,
and every word we find together throws a little shade on you.

You thought desire would be buried beneath the weight of what was gone,
but tenderness remembers its compass, and it keeps pointing us on.
We are not pretending this is easy, and we are not pretending we are the same,
but we are still walking new ground together, and our love still answers to its name.

Then chemo came with poison boots and marched across my veins,
and I thought it had whipped you, Squam, with all my brutal pains.
I thought you had succumbed at last, gone quiet in defeat,
and for most of 2025, I almost trusted the ground under my feet.

But survival left its signatures, sharp, stubborn, and severe:
neuropathy, numbness, nerve fire, and nights when pain drew near.
Balance broken, fingers burning, feet full of fierce complaint,
scars, swelling, stiffness, and fatigue no clean report can I paint.

So do not tell me “survived” means I walked back through the same old door,
because the body keeps the ledger long after the war.
I may have lived through poison, steel, and every sterile room,
but survival still has smoke in it, still carries its perfume.

Squam-free—what a pretty phrase, what a hymn I wanted sung,
until a shadow started growing in the lower left of my lung.
A node, a nodule, a message sent from somewhere deep and sly,
and suddenly you grew new teeth to attack my lung and all of my left side.

You had not died, you little devil; you had learned to travel small,
to hide beneath the scan’s own gaze, to whisper through the walls.
So now we are done with looking only where the larger shadows show,
we are going microscopic, Squam, where your little secrets go.

Signatera has your footprint now, your molecular little trail,
and Tempus came with lanterns to read the fine-print mail.
We are not just watching mountains now; we are studying the sand,
counting what you shed in blood and what you tried to keep in hand.

You thought you could stay hidden in some cellular back room,
but we are doubling down with assays like lamps inside a tomb.
Every blood draw is a question, every number is a flare,
every report another window where I catch you standing there.

And I cannot wait, dear Squam, with all due Southern grace,
to introduce your bad manners to Dr. Chen’s good place.
I hear she has created a SUMO Lab where clever cancers learn
that some locked doors open inward, and some little cells burn.

So grow us a node if you must, Squam, give us something we can see,
give the trial its consent forms, give the researchers certainty.
Tell them I will be there, right on time in their to test their new model.

My hope is now in their immunotherapy, newly minted and novel.

Because I have learned the hardest truth beneath my altered skin:
the viral enemy is not just “out there”—sometimes it begins with HPV within.
You were my cells before you turned, you were my body before betrayal,
my own house foundation has rocked, my own ship drifting, then shifting sail.

That is the bitterest part of you, your cancer cells have my face,
not just that you came for me, but that you spread at such a pace.
You lived inside my boundaries, used my blood, my heat, my breath,
then tried to turn my bodily residence into some grotesque form of death.

But buddy, NO WAY! That bill won’t pass. That story does not end
with me whispering your name as if you are a friend.
You are not a dark god, Squam, not fate, not throne, not crown;
you are broken code with bad manners, and I intend to write you down.

I write about you because some other man is searching in the night,
afraid to name his private wound, afraid to seek answers in the light.
I write because I needed a mentor, and he was hard to find,
so now I leave my lantern burning for the man who comes behind.

Let him know shame is not medicine, and silence is not care,
that fear may freeze him for a breath, but he must still get there.
Let him know he is still a man before and after the surgical steel,
that truth and love and courage are the organs cancer cannot steal.

So pull up a chair, dear Squam, but do not settle in;
this boat is still mine, and I know the weather, wind, and my skin.
You took flesh, sleep, privacy, certainty, and ease,
but not my voice, not my art, not my stubborn professional patient expertise.

I am still here, not untouched, not whole the way I was before,
but louder now, with reserve strength hidden behind every door.
And if you grow again, dear Squam, and give us one clear sign,
I’ll bring Dr. Chen your squamous DNA—and then, old friend, you’re mine.

With respect, my worthy opponent,
But not one spoonful of surrender,

—Ty