Lamp Post

Lamp Post



  Under the lamp post, I stand and watch the vehicles and swarm of people drift by across the street. I am terribly depressed as the scintillating filaments of the light bulb above me struck my head like a halo. I left my lover in a hotel room where we made love, and that was weeks ago. I am not a fool to my lover for I, too, is her lover. Thus I paid the bill as I left her, leaving a note at the dresser mirror where she will certainly look at when she wakes up, saying “bye bye blackbird.” I said bye-bye for she insulted me, and that three word note, I hope, will be enough to explain everything to her. She took the role of a preacher as well as a lover to me.

  I hate it. I hate to be preached. I hate the sweetness of her tongue stab my soul. Thus declaring me incongruous before her. A sinner that will cause a taint to her life of simplicity. And so shall we live the kindle of our love in precariousness? Certainly not. Either I change or she accepts me. I won’t change. So I’ll leave.

  She says the kind of life I have is threatening. She could not be stable at me. She could only come and go when nostalgia struck down. She fears to be away from me. She feared settling under a canopy of night waiting for my return.

  I am filled with vanities. I’m a hedonist. I am a man of pride. I am a sybarite. She loves me but she don’t want me. She says it’s a sin to fall in love with me, yet she loves me and feels frustrated for her love cannot purify me. Thus she doubted if it is truly love I feel for her, or am I just turning her as one of the objects of my pleasure.

  I replied, “Certainly not. If I have a taste of pleasure it is not the scent of women. It is the lights, laughter, crowd, and luxury. But none of it is women, for women turn men down, and I don’t want to be turned down. Not from those nice ass, tempting large tits, and devious eyes of them. But you, you are different among them. I wish we could be together, day by day, forever.”

  But then, she insults me. I cannot be right before her presence of simplicity. Thus perhaps ‘insult’ isn’t the right word. Insecurity. Fear. Spiritual sickness. Belittling of one’s soul before the truth of simplicity. Pride Torn down. Stripped by a lover.

  And as Gautama Buddha wandered away before the swarm of dreadful truth amidst the work of enlightenment, then it seemed that so was I, finding the truth under the shade of a lamp post, as the Buddha found his under the sacred Bodhi tree.

  Like a lamp post, the children’s laughter and simplicity drew a halo above my head. Their innocence is a scintillating filaments pouring down on me in a form of slow drizzle, revealing the specks of dust on my skin. Their simple yet authentic gaiety turned to me as mockery of my folly. I was ashamed. Weakened. Degraded. Then God’s splendor shined forth before my naked eye.

  I lived my life under the dancing lights, into the room filled with smell of liquor, misted by the suffocating smoke of the cigars, through the web of dangling glares of tipsy winos. Only now have I realized that I’m living in a sort of abattoir, wherein no voice could come out from inside, and no voice could come in from outside. Everything is muffled. Thus I seemed to be a dead man. Deaf. Blind. Slave. A slave to the passions of flesh.

  Like a lamp post is the strands of the hair of my lover. Its strands a filaments of light revealing the fault of my pleasure, for the pleasure I have is a poisonous viper that’ll soon drag me through pit of muffled voices.

  I know why she sees it a fault to fall in love with me. She fears that her voice might be muffled within the dancing lights and burning laughter. Let alone silence reign and simplicity prevail.

  Under the lamp post, where I rested my aching feet and catch my breath through long hours of trudging my path into the glamour of truth, I walked away to sought her out and attach her heart to mine.