The Energy of Pain

What would happen to me
if I focused every last ounce of my pain, my sorrow,
my grief, my mourning, my loss, my loneliness, and my torment
onto one place, one shape, one pattern most desired?
Would I finally see miraculous magic in my life?
Or would I go irreversibly mad, or suffer a nervous breakdown,
or witness the catastrophic collapse of my physical health?
I once heard that the most intense supernatural power
comes from the most intense personal emotion. And oftentimes,
that emotion is pain. I also heard that the entire Universe
consists of only two things, energy and pattern,
and that one cannot exist without the other.
How can I even begin to channel the overwhelming grief
I have just suffered when I prematurely lost both of my parents and a dear friend
over the past two years, grief that could produce more energy
than a trillion Hiroshima-type A-bombs?
Do I even dare try to channel it,
at the risk of being driven irretrievably insane?
Sometimes,
the pain is so great,
I just want to sit there,
in my bedroom, in the silence,
and simply shut down.
Sometimes,
I am just too tired
to shed yet another lonely tear.
Sometimes,
I wonder how I could have lived for more than half a century
without having created any kind of enduring legacy,
as if I've been living a wretched lie all along,
betraying my true self with every last step I took.
I sit there and wonder, where did I go wrong?
I keep asking myself, how many wrong turns did I make?
My patriotism died in 2013, when I learned the awful truths about America.
Then my mother dies in 2014, then my father dies in 2015,
and then one of my dear friends, who used to be my girlfriend,
dies in 2016, this year, as if the pain wasn't through with me yet.
And Los Angeles gets more and more overcrowded by self-absorbed outsiders
who just moved here yesterday, and the traffic congestion keeps getting worse,
and the cost of living keeps rising while the quality of life keeps falling,
and the pollution keeps worsening,
and the competition keeps getting more vicious,
and the water supply keeps dwindling,
and the number of power failures keeps increasing,
and the overall insanity of overpopulation keeps drowning out all sense of
dignity, kindness, peace. I cannot recall the last time
I had a good night's sleep.
And I keep lingering on the idea
of cultivating my power
from a pain deep enough to detonate supernovae and cause whole galaxies
to spin. If I just simply embraced this immense, nightmarish colossus,
and allowed my tears to flow without reason and without end,
would I finally have peace after all?
Or would I finally lose my natural mind
after all?

Copyright © 2016, All Rights Reserved