Ordinary Person

Returning from a vacation
in that charming, picturesque
town replete with brown,
stony mountains and verdant,
velvety valleys,
petrichor wafting from the
rich mud outside the quaint
cottage I’d rented,
the grey-white windows burnished
by colourless, slender fingers
reaching down from the heavens,
coffee and silver oak,
a green, chaotic, dwarfed jungle
interspersed with wafer-thin, tall
branches, I should have felt
invigorated or at least
experienced some cathartic bliss,
a vague communion with nature
but though these lines are
descriptive and layered with
metaphor, the naïveté that
once made me look upon
even the yellowest field
with awe has left me,
permutations of what
must be done find themselves
splayed like people lying
spreadeagled and naked
on the canvas of my mind,
the hurt of the past is like
an unsolvable equation,
itching me to try to decipher it,
nothing is what it seems,
as age merges into the next
beauty becomes an
abstraction, a nebulous
concept that one writes about
but no longer perceives, and time
dulls the heart, hardening its
surfaces, so much so that
I might kneel at the altar
with dead faith,
engendering false fire,
begging to delight in
creation again.