What Put Us Together In This Poem by RIC BASTASA

what put us together in the getting to know
and liking each other so well
are our common miseries
and as time would have it we exchange
stories of our failures and how we are able
to cope with each,
to our amazement we have shared the techniques
of sorrow
the art of sadness
the procedure for grief
the poems of lamentations
and the finishing plots for our novels of survival
we put the words so well
as others so well praised it
on that epilogue portion where we keep on thanking
each other
for the success of our failed endeavors
the irony, the paradox
of our mild existence
our solidifying persistence
the elasticity that has not been exceeded by the extreme
weights of our
burdens: to include those that we realized to be also
well, self-caused, self-inflicted
we love it: our blindness sometimes on some spots
where our Achilles' heels lie.