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The ballad of pain

The ballad of pain, I sing with a heavy heart and a light tongue. My heart is weak, how can I carry the burned of love? My tongue has grown weary and my feet bruised and blistered. What is this pain that the essence of sage cannot rub away? If I had a means I would run and leave everything behind, but how can you run away from your own shadow? My soul is beyond salvation and redemption. My pain is beyond herbs and essences. Why didn’t they who had love never told me how hard it was to lose it? Why didn’t they warn me to keep away from it? All I have now is daydreams filled with teeth and nightmares draped in soft pillows. Kill me softly, I pray, but I am a goner anyway aren’t I? I am lost to the world and my senses, waiting to explode when the end comes calling. I thought I was a hero out to save her soul but I lost mine instead. Why can’t I love my tears of acid? Let them burn my eyes away so I cannot see the sun rise tomorrow. Let my heart break, nay shatter so I can pour ash all over me and mourn like a young maid widowed on wedding day. Save me not from my fiery furnaces of guilt and blame, for I do not want to feel the soothing relief of waking up to her wispy touch. Why should you stop me from singing my ballad of pain? Why shouldn’t I sing my ballad of pain?
Why am I reaching out for what now seems so distant? The half moon has never been this far. Thirst parches my shrivelling throat and the sun hits my scalp harder but who am I to quit? Who am I to leave when the pain has just begun? Let me revel in it because it is all I know at the moment. Let me roll myself in it because it is the only emotion that cares how well I am doing, that cares about how I am faring on. Let meekness be my weakness and rudeness my strength. Let silence be my enemy and loud ranting my friend, because who begs for sanity when insanity is consolation enough? Who begs for sanity when it is filled with memories of bitter words and actions? Let me drink from the cup of bitterness and taste from the giant chalice of falsehood and pain. Let me smart from the sting of the hornets and the bites of the tsetse. Let me swim, let me frolic in the rivers of the past, drift off to a place where I don’t know, maybe distance will make the heart too fond for comfort. For who am I without love? I am just but a lump of soil, crumbling in the rain and cracking in the sun, a writer without a text, a herder without a herd. The heart is willing but the flesh is weak, but isn’t being weak my strength right now? Pain will win in the end, so let me sing the ballad of pain, and play the instruments of anguish, dance the dance of sorrow, for what is better than dying, crumbling inside just to be numb to the pain outside?

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