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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZlRX03BzeA

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Pain,

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Is one of the hardest things to reconcile -

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Pain of the endless variety,

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Of the incessant and the incurable.

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Pain changes you in ways that even the strongest,

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The obstinately foolhardy 

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Or those of wrought-iron constitutions,

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Are always intimately surprised.

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You can laugh at pain;

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You can disassociate with it,

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Knuckle down and bear it

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Or attempt to anesthetize it.

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But after the years begin to crawl,

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After being broken by it -

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Like bones on the wrack - 

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And reconstituting against it -

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Over and over,

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Again and again -

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After preparing, weathering and surrendering

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To siege after siege after siege,

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You begin to understand 

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The limits that exist within the human spirit -

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In ways that few else have to

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And informed by what few others can.

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Pain like this, is a siphon;

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It is a hidden sapper

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Or a saboteur.

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It makes you angry.

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It makes you weary.

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And it holds you in desperation.

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By now, I think, I am no more a master of pain,

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Than I am a master at permissing pain to master me.

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For in the end, like a loyal friend,

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It is always there for me.

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It never fails in its presence.

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It never denies me acquiescence.

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It keeps me as I fall asleep

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And greets me when I wake -

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This twisted hand of fate and flesh,

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This phantom that shouldn't be,

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These curling fingers comprised of absence 

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And the meat of mind and memory.

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Reconciling its permanence,

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Is not a facile thing.

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You may be shocked by the incapability 

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or taken aback by vows made in matrimony -

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In sickness and in health,

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In peace and in war,

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For better or for worse,

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Until death do us part.

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Amen

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