Beauty or Suffering

"... how heavy it is for the butterfly to tow a barge!"
                                              ~ Tomas Tranströmer


Why is so much of the music you play
so sad? It's beautiful, 
but not because suffering is beautiful. 

Through the cold months, you wear 
layers of skin like armor. 

When it floods, remember how the pitch
of the roof is gained through windows.

The sun, when it finally arrives,
is the first painful crack announcing
you're still alive. 

That's what joy is like—what the body
bears in order to come back to itself.

You know you can't trust
everything else without expression.