Ordinary Person

Here I am, leaning against 

the wall in my bathroom

with its white ceiling and 

cold, grey floor,

drinking away my sorrows, 

each sip a step closer 

to a semblance of euphoria,

a transient happiness, 

forgetting the mistakes of 

the past and the relative 

obscurity I live in –

no friends to whine to, 

no enemies to hurl verbal 

missiles at anymore, 

the future’s going to be a blur, 

and there you are, 

after saying, “You were never on 

my list!” and outing me 

as some clinically depressed 

loser to a stranger 

who asked me about it 

the moment he met me, 

trying not to piece together 

the shards of a broken marriage, 

using therapy as an excuse 

to delay a much-needed divorce 

that the pastor of your charismatic 

church who prattles in tongues 

and futilely tries to

raise the dead opposes,

it’s good we never ended up together, 

my self-pity would have masqueraded 

as love, weaving poetic phrases 

out of everything he saw, 

boring you with cloying words 

of affection while I hungered 

for your body,

your bitterness would have 

left you unsatisfied, 

and then you would have 

believed I was out of your league 

and not simply said it out of spite, 

we would have spun around 

on a carousel of insecurity, 

distrusting each other’s motives

at every turn, 

so get that divorce, and marry the

next fool, and hopefully this 

wine and the next cigarette will 

help me forget why I still 

think about you when the 

chances of us have faded into 

oblivion and the sun has set, 

the skies darkened and 

the crickets have all shut up.