Painkiller

Pain is the season that never migrates—

its roots vein through basalt, a slow

syllable of magma hardening into alphabet.

I become cartographer of fractures:

each crevasse sings in ultraviolet,

a hymn only glaciers comprehend.

Night unspools its black origami,

folding shadows into origami cranes

that pierce my ribcage. Their wings

are stamped with vanished postcodes,

letters I never sent dissolving

like aspirin on a fossil's tongue.

The body keeps ledger:

every scar an hourglass counting

backward to some silent detonation.

We name this arithmetic memory—

but what breathes in the negative space

between bone and its ghost?

I press my ear to the wall of the world.

Through limestone throats echo

the unspoken isotopes—

half-life of a sob trapped in amber,

a prehistoric insect still beating

iridescent wings against the resin

of almost, not yet, never quite.

Beneath skin’s parchment,

rivers chart their cursive grief,

carving canyons where light learns

to refract in first person.

Pain, that relentless geologist—

polishing sediment until we see

our own strata glow.