Pain is awakening: the expansion of consciousness.
There is no half-way mark:
ignorance in sleep, health in full waking,
bound the gulf of hallucinations we call life.

In that Abyss of lies we deceive ourselves
until at last Truth annihilates the deceived,
unveiling the hidden Glory of the liar.

In the mantle of victimhood, Identity accretes
like a pearl on the tongue of a mollusk;
and a narrator, lost in the telling,
comes to mistake the story for reality,
wounds for tragedy, scars for harm.

Identity forms about Chaos,
a shell of experience that shrouds
a kernel of Truth.

A pearl is but a grain of sand
made beautiful by pain.