by the mark

I will know my saviour when I come to him, by the mark where the nails have been

Our spirits mix with the dirt. The meat and bone and open wounds of a human life. In the flesh we can reach out and touch. A touch is sense memory of a thing, written in language of the skin. It is all a barrier, this skin of the world in perpetual cell suicide. The growing and dying and feeding and fucking itself to the next skin boat down the slipway of the beating heart.
Touch alone can create an illusion of closeness, but our skin is impermeable, inviolate, nothing we can do allows us to wear someone else's skin and begin to know the lives of others. We are as distant from one another in the realm of the senses as from here to the edge of the expanding Universe.
So we suffer. There is a volcanic energy in our suffering. It all seems too much. This whisper inside beats within a cage of bone. It feels the iron bloody pump, the bleeding beat against the bars. Against the limitations of our body. This life force encountering Planet Earth.
Perhaps suffering is what makes us human. We have a spirit and it is litmus tested against the dirty work of being born and dying a death. We look in the eyes of friends and loved ones and we see that their hands are dirty too. They are digging through the days just like we are. Or they should be. There is no place for clean hands as we carousel around our star, for then only nothing happens. We suffer a lack of living, which might be the only true sin there can ever be.
And so, and so. We suffer, we live, we change. The angel wrestles the animal. That is our life. That is the very thing that leaves its mark on us, that leaves our own mark on those we share our days with.