Sue has been living through really awful pain and as one way of coping asked me to try to start writing about the pain, all of its varieties and intensities. Writing gives me something to do when I see her suffering and don’t have much else to do, so I’m trying to find words for experiences that are very much outside of spoken language.

Pain Poem #1

cells slamming into cells
honing every edge
to blades that cut each other
open and you must wait
20 minutes for the vicodin
to begin to block the pain but know
every cell in your body will be shredded
oozing cytosol in 2 minutes,
and you will have to feel
your body disintegrating for 1080 seconds,
and you begin to count:

one thousand one, one thousand two , one thousand three