PAIN

In the morning, nebulous. Later, nebulous. The air is a fruit jelly and there are seeds in it punctuating my eyes. Feedback travels across the monitors at invisible speeds. This instance is a manifestation of pain.

Sometimes pain is manifested by its own recession. The drug is the referent of the sensation it tends to obliterate. The jam is a tightrope between the pain and the treatment. It spreads like everything, all through me and how it pleases, into my liver and it consummates, it complicates its new residence, blindly and how it pleases. My organs do not resist the visitor, the tenant, and from without the thick syrupy jelly is gummed across everything, and it punctuates the weakness of a failed resistance. That is the pain protagonist, bleeding and purging and demanding whatever there is, but the pain remains mandatory, and it is also deaf.

Pain is an apricot: having fallen from the tree it rots a few steps down the hill from where it dropped, toward a river, and when the sun finds its way through the branches, it rots more.