Chronic Severe Incurable

There's nothing more you can learn from pain,

but here it comes again-with its monotone,

its idiot drone, like a brick wall against which

thinking smacks its big skull until it's juiceless

fruit the devil reams clean with red teeth

and razor-blade tongue. Pain:

payment, penalty, punish, revenge-

all these miseries inhering in the word:

you must think no word for what you feel.

The being pain is being is you.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Mar/Apr 2004
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