It is too much to hold; too loud to ignore.
It is too meaningless and yet too heavy in its presence.
It is too meaningless, how it makes us fall from everything.
The lack of everything traces itself on our emptiness,
while the feeling digs and sinks and stabs its way inside.
From the outside it burrows under skin, into bone, until
it seems to emanate outward from our very form of feeling.
It is irreducible within our own consciousness
and makes that consciousness feel itself to be a mistake.

Consciousness echoes out in a bloodcurdling wail.
Between each bout of insincere laughter, it yawns and writhes.

Pain exceeds every name, every ruse of language.
It exceeds every cunning shackle of domination.
Nature is always overwhelming such attempts at mastery.
Pain exceeds every name, and all out-thinking.
It is altogether overwhelming the instant it hits.

The breaching of pain punctuates and institutes the ego.
No wonder so much of its energy is poured into
eliding and effacing itself in the search of pleasure.

All our naming and science can today only be self-justifying,
for so long as there is no domination over pain
nothing can justify its existence.

Even speaking its name, as we’ve been doing, risks identifying with pain.
Using the name tritely expedites the inadequation of the concept.

With just an instant’s duration, it can feel like an eternal presence
Grounding the mind unshakably in what is hostile to it.
Pain is a concrete Idea which engages the whole body in anamnesis.
Pain binds the body to time, before time can become its essence.

Pain exists above all exchanges, profits and dancing.
It is the ground below our forms of intuition.
It cuts across and sits beside any pleasure; brooding and waiting.
It flows in our blood. Always waiting. Always ending.

In-difference, we feel what’s missing
in-divisible understandings.
What’s missing is meaning. But meaning is survival.
But survival robs us of forever;
it bars off and separates for-ever.

As it constitutes the base of our inner sense, Time,
we see that pain is our hitherto history.

Even when safe from physical harm, we’re tormented
by a desire which can never find satisfaction according
to the cultural imaginations which have issued from history.
But we desire nonetheless, so we continue moving forward.
At pains we are repulsed in hopes of finding an end to the pain.

But it will never come, so long as the times are off their hinges.

Pain is perpetually misplaced and mistimed,
not to mention how often it is misrecognized.
Ideology has misjudged and mistaken it
for a noble divine lie; a theodicy.

Pain is the social repercussion of scarcity and sacrifice,
Both of which have overstayed their welcome and utility.
Pain is our separation from divinity; the spaces between words
which render each insufficient; schisms in communal being.

It is the syntax of sexed beings;
the truth which makes advertising so effective;
the seething expression which art appropriates;
it is the negative imprint of the Good which we’ve lost.

It’s a sun which never sets over an empire of chaos;
it is the necessity of speech to be subject to succession;
even when we are momentarily blessed with its absence
its trace remains, taunting us from between the lines.

The wager was not worth the existence of Pain.