Tess Lockhart
  • God Poetry
    • A Preacher's Prayer
    • Advent
    • Advent Watch
    • Ordinary Advent Time
    • First Christmas Post Husband Mortem
    • Christmas Bread
    • Ding Dong Dung
    • Christmas Credo
    • Incarnation Narrative
    • Starlings in Epiphany Snow
    • Evensong in Bleak Midwinter
    • Imposition of Ashes
    • Lenten Ruth
    • Langston Hughes on Maundy Thursday
    • Maundy Thursday's Scattering
    • Good Friday Tenebrae
    • Gardening Holy Saturday
    • Mourning, Holy Saturday
    • A Little Hilaritas What If
    • Milton on Easter Monday
    • Pentecost Invitation
    • For All the Saints
    • Winter Solstice
    • Evening Prayer for the Beloved
    • Incarnation's Repair
    • The News Was Not Good
    • Just Jump Already
    • Job's Modern Lament
    • Uncle!
    • Worship
    • St. Valentine
    • Response to a Dr.'s Rhetorical Question
    • A Prayer of Praise
    • Renunciation and Adherence
  • Marriage Poetry
    • A River of Words
    • Beloved Baptism
    • Anniversary Gift
    • Aching Pain
    • Disappointment for Nothing
    • A Lament of Recognition
    • A Marital Parable Revealed
    • Kissing Death
    • Grief
    • Extinguished
    • Not Exactly Thecla
    • Rectify
    • Love Beyond Terror
    • St. Valentine
    • Divorce
    • Marital Haiku
    • A Mockingbird
    • All for Love
    • Love's Transubstantiation
    • Enough of Love's Ideal Poems
    • My Lie
  • Healing Poetry
    • A Child Abuse Victim
    • At Grandma's Funeral
    • Confronting Nothing
    • For Want of a Ritual
    • Gardening Widow's Weeds
    • Ghost Whisperer Grief Obsession
    • Grief Drought
    • Swimming with Grief's Fear
    • Five Years Post Mortem
    • Middle-Aged Dating
    • Fire and Water
    • Canoe Wrecked
    • Desire Beyond Reason
    • A Survivor's Haiku
    • Baptismal Renewal
    • Of Children, Pigs, and Priests
    • Sometimes
    • The Trickiness of Doors
    • Tenured Otherwise
    • Turtle Soup
  • Quotidian Poetry
    • Cookies for Dragons
    • Leaving My Daughter at College
    • To Mom on Her Birthday
    • On the Third Day
    • Ode to Bermuda Grass
    • Mundane Revelation
    • Sorry White People
    • Truculent Ode to Poetry
    • Twisted
    • DeFuniak Springs

                                  Aching Pain

Picture
I live with chronic pain, thanks to a drunk driver.  I was struck one day with how the progression of physical pain parallels that of the emotional pain that can come from being in problematic relationship.
It starts off as an ache
that, untended, grows
into the generalized pain
of neuralgia.

Then the burning starts
as though flesh 
is being ripped
from attachments 
 
like pulled pork barbeque.
You can feel the pathway
of every nerve 
stinging along

until it stabs
and jolts 
and sucks your breath
so you can do nothing

but feel pain,
all-consuming pain.

Then the numbness begins
with painkillers
and work’s distractions
meant to call retreat

to the ever-advancing pain
that just lurks
waiting to ambush
and kill the initiating problem.

There is now just numbness
where once a heartbeat
skipped with joy
at the sight of you.

And I am afraid
of the healing reverse,
of having to come off my meds
for the rehab of this marriage,

of having to experience again
the jolt of neglect
the stab of straying
that hurts to breathe.

I don’t want to go back
along my nerve’s pathways
to be ripped apart again
and stew in burning anger

only to be left in the end
as at the beginning
in the generalized pain
and dull ache of loneliness

for the wanting of you
wanting me.


                    © 2009 Tess Lockhart.  All rights reserved.
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