Two Houseguests

When Pain invites himself to stay awhile,
he never knocks, he never asks my leave.
It's not within my weakened power's grasp
to spurn his visit to my soul's abode,
nor is my will consulted in the space
before he sets his apparatus up
and starts his grisly, whistling, awful work.
No pleasant meal, no conversations long --
this houseguest never grants accustomed times
when growth and life and peace and health are formed
as customary visitation's wont.
He goes to work, ransacking pantry, shelf,
and plundering my precious jewelry-box;
he eats and steals, quite indiscriminate,
quite inconsiderate of what hurts most.
The trivial and crucial both are game,
and his delight's in tempting me to feel
as though it's all just nihilistic trash,
that Nietzsche wins and Truth goes back to bed,
to sleep awhile amidst this chaos-noise.

Yet there's one thing the gentleman's forgot,
that in this horrored, psychic house of mine
there waits, quite calm, within the sitting-room,
without so vague a faceless mein as Pain,
a Man of quiet beauty, meek in soul,
who honors each of my requests to stay
outside this room or that, this space or place.
He waits to talk with me, to sup with me,
inviting me to share a mystic feast,
and all his speech is song and joyful light,
and all his words are poetry and life.
Unlike the raucous, empty gentleman,
this Guest is neither crass nor unrefined,
nor does he put on airs as for a show --
He's somehow splendid and yet homespun still,
there's something of both earth and sky in him.
He asks a question, waiting yet to see
if I will answer, open doors to him,
and ask him to survey the whole within
my damaged home which Pain's so cruelly torn.

Here now I have a granted chance to choose
if I'll allow the work of Master Pain
to break, and further twists and angles shape,
to mar the beauty of the architect,
to make this house, where food of love and light
should be the daily feast which fills the fast,
into a wreck of filth and sickening waste,
where shadow and disease pervade the rot
which stinking slinks its way from off the shelf,
the stench offending all, infecting all.
My other chance is to invite this Man
to set to work upon the broken space
which Pain has ruthless made my dwelling-place.
He'll clean and build and fill the jewelry-box
with things of truer beauty than before;
He'll paint a mural on the ceiling's face
which lifts the soul to rise into the sky.
There is a kind of cleansing that is Pain,
and in the end it's who rebuilds the house
which grants the soul the choice of death or life.

Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Stephen Damick