I feel your pain

I feel your pain
in my stomach
deep in my womb
at the center of the cave
                        of my heart

day after day
we toil to pay for
generation after generation
of unconscious
thinking
doing
being

hell we're mad
and sometimes it feels like
this world is spun
out of this thread
of mindless pain
woven into unsympathetic
chaos

so how do we untangle and reweave
given our sick and poor
raw materials?

look closer and you'll see
the glitter of some small potential
a hope sometimes so ridiculous
its mere existence shows
the existence of something deeper

and so we go deeper
into the mind
into nature
into reality
into All That Is

And somehow feeling the pain
is both the way out
and the way in
to a deeper way
of living as a prayer
for the dying
and beyond

*original poem by Summer Starr, July 2015