Ordinary Person

I used to buy a pack of Marlboro Reds from a dingy cigarette shop on the street outside my apartment complex. I’d then return, sit on my balcony infused with the neon twilight of dusk, smoke and convulse in the throes of guilt. What am I doing with my life? Does this all end in a cottage nestled in the mountains or the deepest rung of Hades? I’d wonder and then feel an insatiable need to masturbate. I’d then beat off in the bedroom, thinking about an ex with another man, and feel miserable for an hour, vowing never to do something so despicable again. But I was in love with my despondency. I loved sin even though I put on a facade of being a scrupulous moralist who walked the straight and narrow. Sorrow was my mistress, a dominatrix who whipped my buttocks when she felt the need, and I gave in to her every whim and caprice. She wore leathers and a black Bauta with silver embellishments while I sat gagged, tied to a chair. She did as she pleased with me. Slapping me, punching me until my lips bled, kicking me in the gut and twisting my balls. I had my dick in a cage and enjoyed every moment of it. No wonder each poem I wrote adorned her with jewels and bathed her in milk. Every sonnet I wrote was an ode about her that pushed other lovers to the side, portraying them as women without substance and depth.

This is the fate of every man who fails to see the beauty of the Chrysanthemum with its layered, yellow mosaic atop wispy, delicate tendrils curling inwards. This is the story of every poet who cannot perceive the grace of the purple Dahlia, dressed sharper than Solomon on his throne of wisdom. The man confuses pain for pleasure until a punitive buggering feels like drinking honey. He loses his acumen, perception and sense of self until he begs to be scolded and stomped on. With all her mysterious allure, Nature who the sages romanticise fails to galvanise him. Love becomes an abstraction, and no woman except sorrow with her unparagoned viciousness excites him. He asks his wife or girlfriend to cuckold him. To watch while she delights in an oversized schlong, but even this becomes a chore. Nothing he reads makes his mind buzz, and nothing he watches gives him aesthetic delight.

Finally, he returns to the brooding, the crying and the whining. The guilt, like a Leviathan with scaly tentacles and myriad eyes, observing everything and breathing fire and ice. The sin that stains his soul black. The rancour and antipathy. Everything antithetical to well-being and goodwill. He enjoys the profoundly unsettling feeling of angst, like being ridden by a woman with swords instead of legs. He screams in ecstasy when he’s hurt. He sees visions of grandeur, replete with Elysian fields with silvery patches of grass like stars on the earth when he’s penalised. His moksha is diagonal slashes on wrists and cries of pain. His nirvana is a state of perpetual torment where centaurs of agony trample him. His bliss is a burning oubliette where the only sounds heard are the whispers and then the roars of fires. He rejects the aubade and the evening song. He likes suffering, enjoys every moment of wretchedness, and cannot tolerate an ounce of tranquillity. Quietude is anathema to him, like a scarlet, emaciated beast with bulging, pus-filled nipples and yellowing, broken teeth.