Pain. Sometimes the way in is pain.

When I was young I lived under a blessed illusion painted by my parents that pain is temporary. This too, though, is culture prop-up job. One of those old cowboy movie set props dust downs that only looks real through a tight camera angle.

Sometimes in the morning after a night on the wharf my hip sings, some harmonizing echo like last night when the cooler weather rolled in bringing tree whipping wind and whitecaps. The lines wrapped from the capstan to the timberhead are stretched like an erhu. The cold fingers in the wind play. The fleet dances on the whitecaps like middle-aged hipsters when their favorite song plays over the supermarket speaker. This song is a refrain of pain, kicked up in a current and echoing up into the city with it’s apathetic ears and high falutin’ notions of upward mobility. The song sings to the clouds, to whatever heaven waits. This pain sings forever. These bones are just one more instrument being tuned.