Ordinary

 

Ordinary spreads quietly on the shore sideways, 

Not like fire but rust settling on iron.

Like dust building home on the web of spiders, 

Idly sitting on bookshelves where old books remain untouched and unsettled.

The unbothered pages of the classics remain forgotten.

They live with cracks and fractions and fragments.

Fragrance of the old invites those who live in the past timelines,

Who adores old alleys in old towns where old books are piled.

That reminds them of the fragrance of their old love, old souls, old memories,

Old wine, old smoke in the eyes, velvety soft delights.

Old stem of flower begs attention for rebirth,

Rebirth through flame of desire that is ash now,

Lit through the smoke of remains,

The ashes of bones.

Ordinary teaches us to remain placid.

But, can a racehorse stand still?

It orders the room to remain dim light,

To lower its voice, to edit the sharper tone,

To adjust the expressions on your face,

To round off the edges that would admonish thousands of admirers.

To forget the sharpness once the blade carried slitted through shivering bones,

Cut through pale skin,

Tongue burnt for scrambles.

One dimmed ambition lit through the absence of horrid authority,

That intends to disrupt the pace, lessen the voice, the intensity.

One unasked question,

One gulped dream swallowed in teary face with rice grains,

One little joy neatly folded and wrapped in cupboards of 

unfulfilled wishes whispers through my ears,

They tell me to run, run far away, leaving everything stale behind.

I took a deep breath and rejoiced.

But that day I placed it back on the top rack where dust rest, so that it wouldn't disturb me again.

The missile was ticking but I let it slide in gilded guilt and glittery flitters flustered and filtered through their unwanted opinions. 

The desire to be a free bird, to fly uninterrupted, 

Higher and higher runs through my veins, 

Runs in my brain, 

In my cells and neurons,

In my dreams and drives,

So I keep scratching nails.

Biting dependence like inhaling aerosol in sealed room and waiting to embrace death.

Ordinary doesn't command; it suggests keeping quiet.

It whispers, why move when everything is alright?

Why try harder?

Novelty freaks out the ordinary.

So, the ordinary remains the same years after years,

They keep rotating around the same circle, the same loop unidentified.

They keep others around them the same—tied, interrupted, bound to the shackles, tired and deprived.

Frightful and spiteful, locked in the whims of sadness, 

Revolving around in the whirlpool of repression and suppressing the joy in others.

And, suddenly the extraordinary feels excessive,

A burden like, too much explosion in them,

Too much wonder, too much excitement.

A fiery fire in them that lightens the sky and marks the distant stars,

Conspiring constellations in their heads,

Head always in the clouds, feet on the tilted grasses,

They walk around like a living legend.

Their brilliance seems too loud,

The different seems inconvenient, not easy to persuade.

People begins to shrink in their own skin,

That they don't hold the same outlook anymore,

The sparkling eyes goes dim,

The smile fades.

Just to be owned, simply to belong,

Just to be heard, simply to be loved,

Just to be seen, simply to adjust,

Just to be digested easily, they shrink into mules.

The loss of self is unnoticed until one day they feel like vomiting.

Vomit the tyranny they go through.

To witness it all with their third eyes,

Intuitively they no longer belong.

They outgrow.

Outgrow attachments,

Outgrow spaces and habits.

The hobbit of shallowness.

Until the room fills up with people ordinary,

Life gets fuller and busier with the stillness of confinement and adjusting,

Until dust settles in the hooks, on the corridors, classic old book covered in rim of dusts,

Dostoevsky's soul cries.

Cries and yearns to return to rectify the pages he wrote not to be consumed by rust and dust at the dusky and shady evenings; somewhere at the apartments of careless people, where his precious are kept carelessly. 

Until life resembles the same mundane,

Perfectly arranged,

Perfectly quiet,

Perfectly still,

and, extraordinarily ordinary,

Shielded in a guild,

They no more remember who they are, 

What they were supposed to be.

A quiet erosion, 

Perhaps, expansion.

A quiet affliction screaming for division.

A quiet eruption with louder derision,

The eyes say it all. 

The alchemy in the eyes decides for all-

A quiet decision taken in hurried havoc.

Never to be the same,

Never to remain in the same place too long.

The poet can dismiss ordinary days and ignore ordinary affairs with ease, without pause, with no blink of eyes.

She remains present amidst all yet so aloof, 

She hears everything but bypasses what shouldn’t be stored in her heart and mind. 

She does all the mundane things meticulously raised in the artichoke of efflorescence. 

She can still bloom after all the sheds,

Grow still after all the shreds- the wildfire.

The burnt grunts.

Smokey eyes, smokey tongue, smokey feelings arise yet she torments the fire under her,

Tames the untamed spirit beneath her docile face.

She pours tears on her flame. 

And, blames the time. 

Time is ticking for her now. 

A timebomb ready to explode. 

She is ready to burn in the fever of love again.

A fire in her lits with a velvet soft heart dancing in rain! 

To gain pleasure in pain. 

Time and again. 

She says to herself,

Change is unsettling but necessary,

Changes feels trembling, but calls for an emergency. 

To transform must be our life's goal, 

Life moves on just as time. 

Just as the unwavering time,

The stoic and cruel time.

Everytime handing us a fever of tempting initiatives, inviting us to an inferno of initiations, 

An urgency of acting faster,

We have become a terrified deer running for our life, our harshest cruelest survival. 

©® Farheen Akter Bhuian Nancy 

Timestamp: 1.21 pm, T-4, Sc & Hum