Ordinary Person

“and the afterglow…
of your gaze…is the only
sweater that I need.”
― Sanober Khan, Turquoise Silence

Here I am, languishing in the 

languor of the late afternoon  

with a bottle of wine, 

pining for someone who doesn’t  

care if I exist. I tell myself  

it’s the port that makes me  

reflect on Kachnar Trees  

with their pink mellifluence  

evoking sweet-sounding soprano  

arias, but on deeper rumination,  

I realise that it’s just me,  

making you a symbol, a sign of 

something wonderful, transcending  

quotidian rhythms and prosaic muses,  

everywhere but here in my arms.  

I know this is the very quixotism 

that made you keep away,  

the very madness that drove you away,  

and I don’t know what intrinsic  

flaw makes me revert to it,  

making you out to be someone  

larger than life, like an ethereal,  

pulsating orb of brilliant blue light  

sought by an adventurer in a fantasy novel.  

The truth is, you’re ordinary, and so am I  

and all the lines I’ve written  

mean nothing because they capture  

some notion of you that a feeling  

dredges up, painting you in one  

shade and urging me to accept it  

as the truth. There are layers to  

people that they themselves  

don’t understand, and if I were  

a fire-and-brimstone-spewing  

clergyman, I’d grab the T in  

Calvin’s TULIP by its hair and write 

a thesis about the heart being deceptively  

wicked. But I believe in our souls  

lying somewhere between cruelty  

and salvific beauty, possessing evil 

but capable of good, and I’d give  

a lot to portray you just as you are — 

a rusty cog in a machine,  

a broken-winged thrush struggling to fly,

and I’d like to move on after that  

to either sybaritic decadence  

or a redeemed tomorrow 

punctuated with the purple afterglow 

of someone who isn’t you.  

For dVerse

Photo by Nicole Avagliano on Unsplash

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