Prick of pain (a poem)

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

I feel the prick of pain in the thumb,
top joint, a key metatarsal, critical function—
the lynchpin and languishing.
That’s just one sting.

Now imagine it:
42 times in an hour.
The pinching becomes a throb,
the ache grows teeth,
a chronic pursuit,
and my psyche bends around the trap,
enslaved to the inescapable.

The glint of happy comes tumbling out,
a runaway toddler
across the room—
slipped away,
going for the snacks—
while my sister’s rot
curls in the corner,
ignored.

The proximity, the ignorance,
anything with dangerous probability—
what a mash.
Where’s mom?
Where’s the installed voice,
the eye and the ear?
Where’s a voice at all?

The missing thunder is displaced,
held up by ads and slogans,
in radio-wrecked gar fashion,
while interpretation twists,
wrestled down,
bound to assimilate.

Garbled.
Intermix.
Frequency competition.
The liminal space
picks up both signals—
syntax blends,
corrupts,
and objective meaning bleeds away.

I catch the pockets of sound
across 4 seconds,
strung up like static constellations.
They are mutant narratives,
and I go to work—
trying to interpret
what was never meant to be whole.

The split of a cell,
the Segway,
the bounce of syllable and sound,
inflection, tone—
rhythms bouncing along
an existential metronome,
clicking.

The one drum of the universe.
And somehow,
my heart keeps in sync with it.

But this is a world of whispers
and lies
wagging the tongues.

The Matrix has its tells—
obvious misfortune,
reincarnated horrors,
a caste loop
designed to trap
the lower folk.

I resign.
But even the publishing of the witness
becomes a complicit testimony,
marketing another world.

Converted and unified.
Resistance is futile.
It’s the Borg—
and she’s got Budweiser.

The crystallization doesn’t help.
No one’s clicking on that.
The algorithm senses the potential.

Schrödinger’s draft—
kept,
buried in angst and fear,
while twelve more fools
step into line.