Pain Face
Rigid, stoic, mask: broken bone face,
gunshot face, son dead face.
Look, the face: see your rictus
fortune in icterus, the yellow glow
on a one to ten scale. Consider the Pain Face:
love on your lip, love sliding sideways
to make a silly face of pre- and post.
Profess systems of belief, of research:
corollary, corollary, sing. Agreeably sing
of pain as shadow cast by this edifice:
the love face.
Pain’s place is pictorial, a hundred thousand
atlases of your face: tear-stained, unfathomed
by intense algorithms of validated claims.
See the pain face. Underneath it is no face.
From CNQ 92 (Spring 2015)