My Chassis Of Pain Poem by Denis Mair

My body has proven that it can go the distance
It can hike up a mountain, digest a big meal
Hold still in a temple, give and take embraces
It's a daily miracle letting me live my life
With this body I bow down to bodily marvels
Stunning cathedral of embodied homeostasis
Reticulae all the way down, from retinas to ribosomes
Spongy matrices from glia to renal parenchyma
Impulses held in sympathetic-parasympathetic balance
Fanciful neuronal ripples and cerebral integrations
A protein database accessed by gene control networks
Attempts to be exhaustive would only exhaust me
But now it is a rack that is putting me through pain
I mean authoritative pain, as intense as any pleasure
Even so, the chassis somehow manages to stay aligned
Tremendous energy of pain goes coursing through it
So I seek out dichotomies between the rack and me
But I need to learn: I am both the rack and the pain
I am not a chauffeur driving the body-as-vehicle
I am not yearning for ejection or ekstasis
I never want to be anything else but this body
Because it is my spirit temple, I accept its pain
lt brings me to earth when obsession tempts me
It is my proving ground, my bridge of empathy
By it, I vow to identify with life's greater destiny