poetry
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Branching out
A friend once told me that his sorrow owed him something. I believed him then, but no longer do. The only thing my depression owes me is to stay far away from me, never nudging me to explore the darker places within — those desert spaces where the humidity kills and an umbra of madness… Continue reading
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On writing
If I taught poetry to students, I’d ask them to write in the language they think in and use the thesaurus wisely when they don’t. A simple sentence like the petrichor wafts through the mountains, bringing with it the smell of rich earth dampened by the rain can turn into a pappyshow of decent writing… Continue reading
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Life and yada yada
Once dawn broke through with her lucent wings, soaring down like a phoenix, bringing with her fierce reckoning and shaking off hebetude — the sins of your foes avenged by the flick of the wrist, the tossing aside of the bed sheet, the morning run, breakfast at 7, and a need to be somebody everybody… Continue reading
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Say something clichéd
Say something clichéd like those three overused words, the crux of RomComs and evocative drama movies, detailing how Jack endured it all — the fire and the crimson droplets to find Jane, trudging through snow and madness. No one has ever said them to me without a hint of hypocrisy: an askew semblance of jade,… Continue reading
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Today, tomorrow, forever
I don’t think anybody leaves this life in a state of blissful contentment, having achieved everything they set out to do. There’s always the question of the books you didn’t read, the people you let slip away, the pain you unnecessarily let in and the happiness you recklessly forsook. Maybe it’s different if you’re a… Continue reading
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Love and reprobation
Meet me where the earth cracks and a dying stream breathes its last, where the ashen peaks lose their charm and look tobacco stained, where the asphyxiated grass choked by some sadistic, otherworldly force gasps and wheezes, where love meets reprobation and we’re broken, neglected sinners in the hands of a silent sovereign, because when… Continue reading
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Lucidity
Have I told you that you’re the clearest thought that settles somewhere in the back of a shadowed mind, and gently, inch by inch, lights it up, until I’m smiling again though my eyes are bloodshot and I’m staring like someone catatonic, looking through the phases of my life? You may not notice the smile,… Continue reading
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Withered
After we made love the other night, I looked at you, lying naked, silhouetted against the moonlight that crept into our apartment like a voyeur. I let my fingers trace the outline of your body—the curves and the arched back, speaking a language of fiery oranges and whispered reds. I then looked at the surrounding… Continue reading
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When nothing is enough
Trigger warning: This poem, though fictional deals with severe depression, suicide, grief. I visited you in the hospital yesterday. You’d survived your second attempt, much more gruesome than the first. People from church who never asked you how you were gathered around you like a shoal of bream around a diver. Praying and holding your… Continue reading
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Break up poem
Walking into the apartment where I spent so much time with you, I can’t help but be inundated with memories, the times we spent doing nothing but talking for hours on end about the most inconsequential things, the times we spent watching ‘something that will make us laugh,’ because we were so tired of the… Continue reading
About Me
Ordinary Person is a guy who likes to write. He writes fiction, essays, poems and other stuff.
Ordinary Person 