Learning Well Life's Lesson The Real Way Poem by RIC BASTASA

a virtual heart
a second hand experience
of love and pain
and half-deaths from time to time

you call this learning
and you like it
because you stand at a certain distance
and tell yourself
that is enough for me
and then you
leave
and face another world out there
not feeling well
what you have just seen
bloodily
from a fence
and a thin wall

it is different when you bleed yourself
when the wound in your face
tells your eyes
this is it!
when the pain that seeps to your bones
tell your heart
this is it!
when the shattered pieces of your bones rattle and shout at you
this is it!
when the gaping skin sliced by a thin, sharp knife
tells you on the face
bloody hell! this is the pain!
and it is with you sticking on your palm
wherever you go and then you cover your mouth and
say, 'Oh, My God! '

this is learning the hardest way
when it is you that is broken
and not someone else

when it is not another person's story
that you read one night beside your soft bed
and you cry

when you learn to use the word 'empathy'
or 'sympathy'
or the justification of the word
'internalization' about other people's
tragedies, their own miseries and laments
their drowning in the raging sea
their head and hands cut and eaten by unidentifiable sharks
while you watch the show on tv
as you eat your pie and drink your orange juice
and you see
and feel the 'mess of their lives' just like another hit movie

oh, this will be different now,
it is you
do not think or utter death as another word of the dictionary,
it will be different now,

it is you who is dying,
not someone else on the other hospital bed by the other window

then you begin to learn, how is it, what is it,
and how painful is it really. It is you now, baby.