The description 'my days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace' employs intense imagery of dissolution and interior burning to convey the speaker's physical and spiritual disintegration. The simile comparing days to smoke suggests both the rapid vanishing of time and the insubstantiality of the speaker's remaining life. The metaphor of burning bones transforms the body into a site of internal torture and consumption, expressing suffering that no external observer can fully witness or measure. This vivid somatic language grounds spiritual distress in bodily experience, refusing the category distinction between physical and spiritual pain. The psalm thus demands recognition that affliction is not merely a matter of external circumstance but a total undoing of the self, moment by moment.

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