NOTES ON PAIN

De Sade just wanted to blow the paradigm

apart by overloading the hive mind

like Spock and Kirk every other time in

Star Trek: that’s the philosophy of pain.

Foucault liked tit clamps now and then.

They helped him think, and near the end

in Paris bathhouses his AIDS inspired

Nietzsche emerged:  Après moi le deluge.

The Raft of the Medusa’s a commonweal

of pain. Gericault lets you feel it deep:

black and white, young and old, equal

in wave-tossed enervated suffering.

Though nothing is more democratic

than pain, the difference is for the privileged

it’s a luxury, like salt on their life’s meat;

for the rest of us, it’s the thankless oxygen.