Lorem Ipsum
1 Minute Read Time
A space on a page that’s
waiting for something else
is where Pain Itself is
put, the Lorem Ipsum,
Latin borrowed from long-
suffering Cicero’s
The Purposes of Good
and Evil as far back
as the Dark Ages so
as to frighten the white
panic of empty back
to nimble lines of good
and passing order. Nor again,
Cicero wrote,
is there anyone who
loves, pursues, or wants pain
itself because it is
pain, which one suspects he
thought as evident on
its face, and so perhaps
it’s not so passing-strange
that suffering is fine
nonsense with which to span
these vacancies of print.
Pain has always kept our
walls apart. We fill our
rooms with old hurts the way
we fill pillow ticking
with bird feathers, so that
we can sleep in peace, spooned
close with our familiar
gibberish until it
becomes the very air
we breathe and our aching
chests fill with it to hold
a place in which the truth
will go as mercy sees
there’s no anguish worse than
empty, no love greater
than waiting to be filled.
Read more from Issue 16.2.
