I’ve suffered in silence. Haven’t you?

Walking the fluorescent aisles,

containing our pain under child-proof caps.

Finding no wisdom in affliction,

we ingest relief by the milligram.

Our culture—

strident, violent, afraid—

can’t or won’t tolerate slowness,

or mystery,

or the long, brutal education of enduring.

Instead:

We swallow.

Metabolizing our despair,

dissolving our alarm in the acid offered 

over the counter 

or, better, 

by prescription only.

Each pill is a vote:

for convenience over contradiction,

for silence over symptom,

for chemical clarity

in a polity allergic to ambiguity.

We call it “care”

But what is being cared for?

The person?

Or the mere performance of the person—

smiling, industrious, non-threatening,

fit to return to work by Monday?

There is neither ritual relief nor liberating solitude—

not even a peignoir’s sensuous complacency—

only our daily sacrament of efficiency.

Little white wafers of forgetting,

always at hand.

What cannot be named

can be prescribed.

What should be mourned

can instead be numbed.

A quiet arrangement.

Adopting the discipline of a clean fix,

we still harbor our invisible wounds,

yet go on swallowing,

hoping one day to wake up

finally 

well.