“Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.”
― Charles Bukowski
The pastor would return home
after flirting with the
ladies at the church, leading
them on with quotes laced
with Ecclesiastical seasoning,
a fragrance that he believed
added another wondrous dimension
to his redeemed soul, and find his
wife playing with their son.
He’d backhand her.
“I don’t want you mollycoddling the boy,”
he’d say, the spittle like little shards of
a broken mirror, falling on her face.
He’d then torture the child with
long-winded spiels about a ‘man’s
place in society,’ slapping him if he
didn’t nod at the right time,
ask his wife to bring him supper,
and quickly finish it before taking
her to bed, irrespective of her
mood. The boy grew up,
a spitting image of his father
but instead of religion, he chose
art — raw metaphors of
gashes and pustule-ridden penises
symbolising anger,
images of commodes and
urinals, a scatological obsession
rivaling Mozart’s, representing sin,
and a tone of unparagoned hate,
masked by allusions to some poet’s vice like
Larkin’s addiction to violent pornography,
running through his work
like a blade cutting skin.
The women loved his poems,
called them ‘real,’
and he lived a life of sybaritic
decadence, taking what he wanted,
when he wanted it,
going off on self-destructive
benders which involved cocaine,
hookers, and downers that
gave him an introspective melancholy,
making soft music played on a loop
seem otherworldly —
delicate but callused fingers
of bittersweet inspiration, fuelling
the sober odes
he published once in a while,
the mellow, auburn, lyrical poems,
making his readers think he
was a gentle soul at heart,
a tough man with a soft core,
a fleshy delight within husk.
The women swooned and swooned
talking about Jackson Pollock’s
Full Fathom Five —
the energy of
being and the animus towards
conformity, the darker aspects
of the psyche represented
as a galaxy, a world that
seizes and imprisons.
Another writer, a goody two shoes
with raging, sexual angst
rivaling Don Jon, unrealistic
needs and desires projected
on a page as poems about the
sun, stars, moon and sky
hated him, labelling him coarse
and lewd, afraid his own vulgarity
would rise to the surface like
bubbles in hot water,
and so, he wrote more
about the sun, stars, moon and sky
to assuage his guilt and insecurity.
But this isn’t a poem about either
of them. You can consider
everything written above a red
herring like deception used in a
mystery book, or a waste of time,
I don’t care. I believe we all have
those older brothers
or younger brothers in us,
those self-righteous pretenders, or
those prodigals,
we’re all Janus-faced
like a motivational speaker
asking one to lead their best life
before shutting the doors of his
church when a flood hits,
barring refugees from entering
because he has money
hidden in the pipes,
but it takes shrewd discernment
and humility to accept that
you’re not a good
person who has made a few ‘mistakes’
and led a ‘reasonable life’
or a hard lesson to stop
venerating your moral turpitude,
crowning it with a coronet of
white tears or little bottles,
it takes Zen to balance
the good and evil,
the superabundant harvest
and Chernobyl,
but I’m not here to preach,
I think I’m both an older and
younger brother, an amalgamation
of earning grace and receiving it
with tears, but as I write these
lines — a hypomanic muse
like the one that runs through
oddball comedies shapes each
word with a Mephistophelian
intensity as they stumble or strut,
fail or empower,
possessing me with chronophobia,
an impetus to write, write, and write more
as the clock ticks, tocks, chimes, whines
making madness my best friend,
giving me bloodshot eyes and insomnia,
my bearded face framed in
a dark aureole, an
insatiable need to wage war
interspersed with a silence that
drifts over greyscale —
silver, soothing, shutting out
noises within and without.
Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash
Ordinary Person 
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