The Disillusioned Individual

written by Suzan Abrams

We live in an ephemeral existence, shouldered by any one number or more of varied transient tragedies that may be soluble and interchangeable in their masquerade to demonstrate the careful balance of ordinary life. We could bubble ourselves up into the fat round sphere of a still moment, engaging in its lively discourses and receiving in its meditative light; but only if we draw away the long evening shadows from curtains of the past. Then remembrances become impossible and time...once more unhurried and newly-born, succumbing to the infancy of the virginal.

The disillusioned individual likens his ordinariness to a self-imposed grandeur. He carps about the madness of monotony and rests in the limelight of attention, company and want. He craves his audience and cannot escape. He fears holding the solitary card. He hides his grovelling under the table and reduces it to a drone of mutterings. In this orchestral sphere, the watchful dust floats on its raft of nothingness where even time is tuneless and the ghost of death snores from too much sleep.

The disillusioned individual serves his dullness light and to perfection, balancing friends and foes with uneasy acumen that all would colour his distorted observations with a haphazard symmetry of tall black specks that playact light. Happy giddy lines like bright 'n sparkling avoid his sphere...they wouldn't dream of trespassing surely for what else is there except to plod the chosen tunnel of a celebrated darkness and to then label his imprisoned pessimism as truth.

He struggles for a view beyond the wreckage of broken gravel under his feet. He may not see that he wears a shoe at all but harps on the missing shoelace or the wear and tear of a heel. The disillusioned individual is blind in his insistent self-proclaimed imaginings. Let no man tell him otherwise. In his life,there is no light and even the soft low flicker, courtesy of an industrious torch may fail to showcase a performance. All life offers is the sound of his own sad voice and the proposal to a marriage bent on listlessness.

I take you now in bad times and in tears, in sickness and in a coma, for worse and for the worst till death drags us down and till death makes us one. But then we never believed in life's fat alluring promises or its long slow crawl ...so what of the encumbrance of indolence. We were never really there. And so the disgruntled individual swears... all the while the sharp taste of acid, rancid in his mouth. - suzan abrams -