Pain

Pain

Tarnished memories
Like word associations haunt
Making mind fragile
Water boiling over
Scalding blisters of hurt
Breaking old skin wounds
Tearing claws on
carefully patched up scabs
The dark blue veins of clotted
Blood flow its poison flowering
Poems of madness
The faded yellow scars reassert
A kind of vicarious life
Viciously driving frozen icicles
Stalactites and stalagmites
Furrowing apart painful caves of
Darkness.

Why do you say to me
That the healer of wounded hearts
Is Time?

Time is unconscious flow
Of passage of events
Memory is the grail which chooses
To keep the bloody trails and broken bits
Of our powdered hearts
Crushed by conscious agents in
Acts of deliberate cruelty.
The cross we carry, is like the
Laugh of the madman
He knows not why
But laugh he must
And raucously howl
At the moon baying for
His heart blood.

He who willingly ascended
The Cross, carried it knowing
How we too are bound to ours
Beasts of burden
Beating our breast the
Heart's cancerous tick tock
Reminds us of our time
That concocted figment
We imagine as past
It dwells to charm
Swells to burst
But cares not about what is
Forgotten.

What is lost in oblivion
Is not our past.
What is healed and happy
Is not a memory.
Those pretty pictures
Are our background cover
And introductory face to
Our hidden cave.
Inside dwells the primitive
Captive of the living past.

The past from which
There is a little reprieve
But no escape.

Time can't discard the sacrificial
Entrails of our chopped up selves
That flow bleeding into its currents
Carrying votive flowers offerings
Of our furious rage
Against pain.

It carries on, just like us
My friend.

© Amrita Valan 2015