Is this pain, this distress
The one psychologists call madness?
Is it the one that past martyrs underwent before they died?
Or is it the one brimming poets' minds
When their dreams are nightmares
And when their poetry is thrown into rejection-bins?

Is this the pain that make the so-called heroes
Sacrifice their lives for their fellowmen?
The pain at a strike of heart break-
Where the loved lover is caught with pants down
In a pub or pathway;
Is this the pain a raped child undergoes?

Or the pain the Somali child suffers before the last hammer-hit of hunger?
The carbon copy pain I have experienced when insomnia
matures into schizophrenia
That now sits in my medulla oblongata and forever will be part of me.