The way they read poems

Of all the poems they wrote and

All the cigarettes they smoked

The desperate times they were stoned

Makes the story so romantic,

A movie so aesthetic, a photo so artistic

The depiction of pain has been so much generalized

At every corner, I witness

An everlasting romanticism of pain

The provocation to glorify depression

It is not easy to undergo pain

And to manifest it in ways

The poems are an experience

The cigarettes, a distraction

There is nothing so romantic about them

Oh but the experience itself is lethal

And the reader and the watcher are amazing,

We humans with our inquiries

Are either stupid or unbelievably

Extraordinary to bring to life

The numbness in the words

And the Greys of the ashes

To life and color.