Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Pain Scale for Fossils

(after Liv Mammone, after Taylor Carmen Savath)


... and how would you rate your pain today?

1. This is pain where you are in bed. I am
in bed, too. While you call this a "sick day"
I call it Good Morning...

2. Good morning. It is going to rain.

3. Good Morning. It's going to rain fire.

4. Pain is a forecast. Pain births itself
like a mythology. These arms of mine
are Egyptian Wings, legs like Roman
columns. I know my body is a temple;
my doctor speaks only in dead languages.

5. This is an unsure place, the knife's edge
of my body, the tipping point between, "Is this
as bad as the pain will get? Am I going back
to bed, or spend the day, walking in the rain?"

6. It is raining. It is always raining, or going
to rain, or threatening. My plans are rice paper.

7. Fifteen years ago, the pain that kept me in bed
for eighteen hours a day, is what I now call "ow."
Someday I will call "7" a favorite lost world.
The pain settles in layers, like fossils, like epochs.

8. Good morning. It is raining Tyrannosaurs.

9. Rain as soothsayer, rain as oracle, as doom,
as pestilence, and always, and entropy, and cause
of death attributed to... no more words fit here.

10. End game. Extinction event. Rain forever.


1 comment:

  1. "I know my body is a temple;
    my doctor speaks only in dead languages."

    Damn, Ryk. DAMN.

    ReplyDelete