"On pain".
"What do you hope to reach once disaster becomes merely
drifting blood pressure dropping is a dream that fills
the mind, the last one vowing it was always like this.
The skin burned nothing, the scar even less.
You want all the signs of danger exhausted and unheeded.
The fire you feel, the inflammation
of an enlarged appendix, a tumor pressing against one's skull.
Coltrane holding his white side, his liver's cries
muffled in vain.
All that says beware, beware with gasp
and swell in tongues of fire and blade.
But when all warnings beyond calls, oh,
how sweet, how do you know it's a system, a sister to thought,
a kind of reckoning that rivets our air until it becomes
the origin, the burning seed of time to come, the threat of it,
the pulled fingernails, sodomy via broomstick all because
of a premonition that heralds an end, an end the body
will do anything to dodge, a certainty
flaring in nerve endings in the yelping brain.
The heart beating its caged animals, cowardice, i.e.
fear, a sign of an overactive imagination,
Hemingway says, that outstrips all notions
of honor or integrity.
You want to live in honor?
Try these broken ribs.
A grimace and your imagined children are starving.
Honor, not to betray comrades.
How do electrocuted testes feel?
How rape, gang rape of you and yours before your eyes
to choose survival among glare and char
in the church of bow and debase.
The greatest honor then the precious gift,
no principle however glorious may justify the taking of.
Does the body know no other mantra?
Its suffering a mistaken law that prods each breath."