My Room-mate for Life

Pain shares its room with me.

Dry, desolate and dreary.

Sometimes crying out in unheard wails,

Weeping in tears of moist salinity

I look with innocent wonder at his wet cheeks,

Admiring the defiant ambers of extinguished hope.

There are moments, when some profound deep emotion

Stirs within his bleeding heart.

His eyes show only a thin screen of gathering red.

A shade not as crimson as the dying tide in the lap of the setting sun

But a shade closer to a mountain stream

Bathed in the blood of fallen knights.

Defiant in death. Glorious amidst gore.

A shade which is more an admission than a mystery.

I discover that he feeds nonchalance to fight despair.

Gazing at him in honest awe, I wonder.

Pain shares his room with me.

Dry, desolate and dreary.

Dust gathers on my books and his,

Reminding us both of a prolonged slumber.

Yet, pretense makes us look beyond

Our horizons of comforting agony.

Life escapes in a shameless trickle

Dancing a naked, vulgar dance of crude mockery.

As a victor to a vanquished, as a master to a caged beast.

Me, quiet on my callous couch-

Remain a silent spectator to this torrid tussle.

Ignorant if to enjoy or empathize.

My friend weeps in sincere surprise

Or sense of loss. I wouldn’t know.

Pain shares his room with me.

Dry, desolate and dreary.

I amuse myself with his poems sometimes.

They leave my mind crippled and heart numbed.

I feel a lurking trauma unfathomable in disguise.

Still, at every sunset when I steal glances at him

I see dusk diffusing from his forlorn face to fit the sky.

His features the image of apocalypse.

He frightens me sometimes.

Yet, at times, Silent, Serene and Solemn

He meditates in search of some primitive peace.

I worship his poise at those times.

I admire his creations which speak of him.

Telling a tell of frozen despair.

I feel they are not for love or life.

For love touched him, warped him and left him torn.

A Cosmic joke stares back at me.

I decide to console him not.

Let Pain be Pained.

Let Pain be at Peace.