Suffering Is The Only Honest Work

Suffering Is The Only Honest Work

By James Gauntt

I.

Rich lay flat in the tall grass,
and you had a reason to run.
I’d stay with the writhing wounded,
Come help or a mountain lion.

Hope against panic, this was real,
A chance to make use of our bodies,
A chance to be men in the flesh.

And the joy in your step
As you bounded away
Took with it the shame of my joy.

We bonded in the fracture of a collarbone.

II.

Suffering is the only honest work,
Pain’s wail the only song whose words
Can’t be gargled in the cynic’s throat,
Reduced to truth, then spat to the walls,
Bitter karaoke…

Thus, pain is irreducible, pain is true,
Suffering the only honest work.
False wisdom!  You showed me otherwise,
On the run…

Mile seventeen-point-two…
I can’t go on!
Seventeen-point-four…
My lips are cold, and the sun is warm.
Seventeen-five…
The wall, the wall, the fucking wall!
Seventeen-six…
No more!  I can’t! Not any more!
(As six more steps plod the asphalt)
Interrogate the body!
Purge it of its false intelligence!

III.

That the flesh is deceitful
Is divine consolation,
And in periods of keenest pain
I’ll know that I’ve run through walls,
That doubt is a bad idea,
And this death not even a trailhead
On the endless loop through ourselves;
That when my body lies flat in the tall grass,
The rest of me bounds up the hill.

Here is a link to the backstory of the poem