JOHN HORVATH Jr
Ten Years Plus, Still Thriving

Decade of togetherness, unloving each
morning awakening to that bleak yawn
Stygian hole of stench swelling toward
my spine, reaching its tendrils across
banks of muscled flesh knotting itself
into great bulks of shot patterned spots
where the pain seems specific. A deer.

Ten years plus this pain unofficial pain
thriving; though thankful for its escape
from captive in my head (its source by
nature - of course the brain, no medic
need explain where senses sit) so now
by cause unannounced - perhaps an all
too willing mind - or given name to make
it actual, actionable for practitioners
who uneducated in such trivial as what
pains they give their patient - cadavers
never once rose to bitch about a poke
nor low life ER scum rose from dead and
bellowed ouch. Uneducated in pain, how
can they believe it; surely it must dwell
in one tight place some instrument
medical yet medieval might yet detect.

Each year the pool of bets grows large;
Each year no winner claims that pot. It
cannot leap from joint to joint, ankle
to hip, then up: I have an article or
two published in the finest journals and
my colleagues in the Medical Association
now agree. You must cooperate. Its path
may then seem along the spinal nerve and
may seem to spark in some unlikeliest
spiral to seat of pain above, it is a kind
of cloud that rains dis-ease. Stop at
my front desk; take two of these, make
an appointment six months from today.

My god it seems we need you talk
to our volunteer psychologist (Her thesis
was on pain). Ten years of it? Tsk. Tsk.
I had an uncle's aunt by granddaddy's
fourth wife maybe third who after birth
of five strong boys imagine housework
with such a lot and no conveniences back
then yet it's been said she suffered your
immodest pain, yet not one complaint was
ever passed her mouth. She read her
sacred texts and took her comfort there.
 
Yes. I have heard the Job job, seen it
linger in eyes that look aside a moment
when I turn toward them. I am no Job.
Yet thriving day to day, we've grown fat
on moans, thick on sudden outbursts from
our lips that mean to speak but only make
some awkward noise. Are you okay? they
ask - the world wants to know, then
disregards or wishes me, Be Now Well.
Fool Lazarus rose when asked and since
There are no pains that linger on beloved
Souls. Something unseen, you're damned. 

Doubtless, touch of saintliness ought,
would, could, should, and certain might
make peace with pain as does poetry -
some poets take to this languid therapy
of lines labored across pages with faux
ink less permanent when typed to screen
(perhaps also less demanding of senses -
surely less needing sense - than hand-
written words). There may lay magic hid
in scrolled electron's momentary passing
then no more, its brief life complete in
simply seeming to evaporate. Modeling
our lives perhaps, reminding us whose
hand upon the modem controls our on and
off, those pages that we have visited,
those that we paused awhile to reason on,
what we leave behind and what download,
and which order forms remain blank. Ah,

if only pain too might be a Turing link
that ons or offs according to my preset
needs. It is not. Pain is akin not with
machine but with poetry: insistent day
to day, its steady patient praxis stuns
exotic past to which it links, measures
present pain, its contexts too, invents
words for it, embeds it on a page whose
repetitious retellings force to surface
long roots buried deep, makes our minds
shun what is actual, make palpable what
is our truth, then make each ever every
one of us prefer to focus on mere words
for it. So then, a poem is - to be sure -
a place where some saintliness has put
its touch. And, pain must be knowledge
of such truth. God's gift to us is pain.
But better you than I should suffer it.