. .........The Last Rose..........
by Rock Ee
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Ahhhh Lucifer, you find me again in this grim sanctuary.
I swore the last time, "NEVER AGAIN!"
You just laughed, and said that we ALWAYS return.
Touché, my friend!
But now you don't scare me as when I was younger;
You simply make me sad...

A dingy room, not unique...
A place where we come to pay our dues to the devil.
Floor rough, unpainted...
Walls painted too MANY times...
Numerous chips in the paint expose each layer;
Bear testimony to the decades of laughter
and despair this place has seen;
Or more often a simple marking of time;
Waiting...
Waiting for what, one doesn't begin to know;
Beset by a boredom so deep it becomes a sort of agony...

In the center of the room stands a bed,
Cover threadbare, iron frame painted and chipped.
(This is where it happens.)

Sometimes we sit.
Sometimes we lay.
Often we talk and moan in our sleep.

"Doctor, lay your  hands on me!
Work your special magic.
Make the bleeding stop!"

"Cut out my eyes, my ears, my heart, my soul.
Make me disappear!"

"Make the pain go away."

"Don't go..."

For some, not critically wounded,
this is just an interlude, a place to heal ...

Others find the door...

Shuffle now to the ancient dresser,
dark brown, finish cracked with age.
I run my fingers absently over the scarred surface.
Every tenant of this place it seems, must leave his mark.
...Robby loves Susie...
...SA + RL...
...Jesus loves you...
Hearts with names and cute little arrows
carved deep into the flesh of this dignified old servant....

We think we are so unique...

On one wall is a door...
Opposite a window,
glass bubbled and wavy with time...
On the window sill sits a solitary rose
in a dirty white vase.
Some of the petals are blackened,
Many gone altogether.
For such a long time it has been left alone
by tenants and staff alike;
Sometimes through some errant bit of sentiment,
more often through simple negligence.

A bright October sun streams through this window.
It makes bright shafts in the airborne dust in the room...
Casts great squares of light on the rough floor
that spill halfway up the bed...
The bed on which we (each in our own time)
lie and succumb to the devils within...

I sit now, head bowed.
Eyes listless,
fall upon the rose...

And this rose...
Isolated here in this temporal backwater.
It could be the first rose ever,
or more likely the last...
Even ravaged as it is by time it is still strangely attractive.
And the jagged shadow of it
cast so casually across the room,
Dark, violent, pretty...
It slashes across the floor,
diagonally across my chest,
and up the far wall.
It could be a crack in the wall,
It could be a doorway out of here...

There is no one to see...

Ahhhh Lucifer, my friend,
Don't be so strange!
I pat the bed beside me.
Come and sit.
Break bread.
Drink of this, your only vintage.
Welcome me home...

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