(x = space)
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Day 3
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Of an awful week
When everything still hurts
And crying underneath the skin
Wants out
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Being ganged up against
As electrons, anyway
What they’d say for real
We’ll never know
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Time for change
But how a change
When nearly everything
Is frozen
Like Merlin
Like Ophelia
What kind of life might
Come after
Shouldn’t be a mystery
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C L Couch
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ice on the fountain in my yard
Photo by erin mckenna on Unsplash
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(x = space)
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Prescriptive Talk
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The pain
It courses through me
I want to feel better
I want vindication
I want acceptance
In the world
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Mainly, though,
I want the pain to stop
And feel better in
That way
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C L Couch
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Spikes
Photo by Andrey Grinkevich on Unsplash
Meadowlark Botanical Gardens & Meadowlark’s Winter Walk of Lights, Vienna, United States
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(x = space)
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Hot Mess
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A knifing pain
Guts through
This is not a study
The other one
Must be a saint
So this must be the demon
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Hooked on one’s own
Fallacies, who can
Judge the partial
And unknown?
Who should?
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God should
But we are here
On Earth
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C L Couch
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lit cooker gas ring
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
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(x = space)
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The Problem of Pain
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It keeps other things
From happening
It freezes us
In case the next move
Should hurt more
We get caught up in
Indictment and
In judgment
We want the world
To stop hurting so much
This way
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A muscle pain
We can get over
Even headaches can be
Resolved (at worst,
through wishful-thinking
maybe Ice
maybe thinking
about ice)
But pain offers no answer
To itself
Perhaps because the
Only resolution is
From outside
From someone else
Who gets it
And who cares without a fee
With no assurance
Of divine guarantee
The odds say we’ll get over it
The odds say
That we don’t
There are too many ways
Of counting
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Pain leaps us into an unknown
A life without
An anchor except the one
We do not want
And can’t control
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Let it go
Let go life
Not at all to die
But in waiting
And in waiting
Doctors without doubt,
If it’s that kind
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But this, the kind
That wears the soul away
Wait
And wait
And try to live
Fractured, meantime
Until someone takes hold
In a way that angels and grace
Have not offered
On this side
So much
Except perhaps
In mystics
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C L Couch
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The Problem of Pain is a popular treatise by C. S. Lewis. A more narrative response to the problem is his A Grief Observed.
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Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash
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