The ignorant
believe pain is terminal,
an end-all-be-all affliction
that is dark and infernal,
and they all clutch desperately onto
an illusory notion of “happiness.”
The experienced
know pain to be a part of life,
something that, in time,
we recover from,
and they all hope to have the strength to heal.
But I know that
pain is metamorphic,
an ever-changing manifestation
of all of life’s struggles.
We never recover from it,
and it never disappears.
It merely retreats into the hollows of our partial souls
until the time comes when
it hits us with the force
of ten thousand bullets,
and we are left to wonder
how we ever got it to shrink like a snake into a clay pot
back inside us in the first place.