This is a poem about pain

Pain I never asked for,
Pain I deserve,
Pain I can never understand,

your pain

feet, knees, and backs,
cells dividing, splitting migraines,
dull, thudding, sharp as a knife,

fear.

I can’t breath.
I hate you forever,

Violation and hunger

The kind of pain that never goes away, but is assimilated, Lamarckian integration into the genetic code,
Generational shifts and evolution.

“What doesn’t kill us make us stronger?”

And then, radical forgiveness and true tolerance

That boy in the back of he bus? Maybe he was lonely and desperate. Maybe he was beaten by his father. Maybe he needed power to prove he was worthy of living.

If you rip away the chrysalis too soon the butterfly dies.

Pain may grow into resilience.
A resilience that I own.
A resilience we all deserve.

Dedicated to the students in the Poetry and Creative Writing group in the Studio For Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design on 11.7.2019