pain climbing

Last night the pain began to climb. It's never done this before. It left the place where it has lived, as deep as memory reaches, for some unknown point of migration. This home has been, til now, right at the center: in the solar plexus. The pain is its own whitehot miniature sun, centering its own galaxy of invisible unresolution. Gathering ungrounded wishes, unanswered questions, unsutured wounds into its whirling orbit, by the force of its own self-inclining gravity.

But last night, it began to rise. Or maybe, flares and tongues of its fire flamed out and began to rise. It used the ribs, one by one, as a ladder and the sternum as a scaffold. It blackened all the bones that it touched, so they looked like the aftermath of a forest fire. It wiped out normal weather patterns in the heart as it passed, with its too-proximate heat and pull. It compressed the lungs with its invisible density, so that they could barely keep inflating. At one point it seemed to be going for the throat - does it want a stranglehold? Does it wants to take life? But no, not that. It seems to be reaching for the vocal cords.

What will happen if pain takes control of voice? Will it rage inarticulate, splitting silence with its useless, severing sounds? Will it collapse, implode into annihilating or portalling singularity, leading into oblivion or another dimension? Will it find a medium in which to speak this voyage of useless alienation and thwarted power, to some constructive end? Will it gain, somehow, the articulation to express this seeming impossibility of the now: objective awareness, unscarred, unsinged, mute, resides right next to the heat. So very near and yet completely apart from it, almost as if red and blue stars could share one galaxy's center. Aware, acknowledging but other. Waiting to learn what survives this convergence. What sun, if any, will finally rise...