Beauty and Lust – Read Poems aka Dinosaurs

ABOUT THE POEM: The user is highly introspective, battling intense lust and low emotional intelligence against a high moral character ("Ronie"). He fears his desire and expresses it awkwardly, leading to loneliness. He recognizes he needs to stop hiding his passion ("randa") and learn the subtle "dialect" of flirtation—the "ease"—to successfully bridge respect and attraction with women.

This is something beyond mere bad intentions-people with very little ability have those, not me. The reason I don’t have a girlfriend until today is because I’m too horny. I have a lot of lust, and it isn’t an issue of intent; it’s part of my character that I feel it in excess. It steals the show, taking the spotlight away from moving step by step toward mutual understanding and affection. I end up giving the wrong message by mistake. And my low emotional intelligence makes it seem like lust is the only way I know how to approach a girl.

I don’t live by the clock. Sometimes I sleep at eight and wake up at midnight in the middle of winter, and I have no desire to sleep again. That’s normal for me. From my study years to my athletic days to the period of alcoholism, I never cared about a watch. For me, dark is light and light is dark; neither is special. I’m lonely during the day just as much as I am at night.

That “love at first sight”-I never saw the girl beyond her eyes, let alone anything below the belt. I was afraid that even looking at her would make her dirty. With the girl in college, I restrained myself whenever she became affectionate because I was scared she would misunderstand me. Maybe that’s why I could never say what I actually felt, and I lost her-and many others later. When I say nobody ever wanted me, I mean I wasn’t good-looking enough for anyone to choose me on that basis alone. A man desires women. That is biological and natural. It is not a flaw in my character, but I treated it as one. In India, women portray themselves as devas-untouched by desire-yet the same woman at night expects a man to ravage her. At my age, I didn’t know the second half of that psychology. I only knew the devi part. If I told a girl that I desired her, it would weaken my claim of being with her. Besides, I don’t think the two girls who tried to hit on me did it successfully, because they only tried to touch me-by accident or by intent, sometimes even forcefully.

The only real solution is following my own decisions and desires instead of being manipulated by someone else’s. My questions were unclear; I wasn’t asking the right things. I was beating around the bush, trying to act naïve the way they did.

No matter how affectionate I am inside, I have no problem calling myself a randa, a man of lust. I’m stating facts and looking for answers.

I don’t chase. One negative reply and you’ll never see my face again. And those girls must have thought at some point over tea: “This motherfucker didn’t persist or insist. We might have even said okay.”

Women know that a man has desire-you just have to say it, or at least hint at it in simple human language: how you want to express affection, how you want to be close. I didn’t know any of that, or how to express it. What they respond to is ease-someone who isn’t terrified of his own desire.

My desires come out sideways.
My affection hides behind restraint.
My emotions speak in the wrong dialect.
It’s not that women didn’t want me-
it’s that they never got to know who I was beneath the noise.
And the problem is lust.

People think dominating someone aggressively or humiliatingly is sex. It’s not. That’s just fucking. Real sex is when she starts doing things herself-when she says, “Try this,” or “Move like that,” and you allow it, even while thinking, “What is she doing?” That’s where equality appears. Only a man strong enough internally can allow that equality. A man who isn’t scared of himself can let a woman take initiative without feeling insecure. Some men-and some women-never live long enough emotionally to reach that point: to know each other in love, vulnerable and present at the same moment. A predator wants submission; I want shared vulnerability. A woman only looking for someone to “eat her” is a small woman. Why is he a dog? Why don’t you serve yourself rather than submitting?

I have character even if I don’t have a girlfriend. And I have intelligence, I have mann, even if I don’t have emotional intelligence. I treat my desire as a weapon that might hurt the women I respect, so I disarm myself. But a disarmed man often feels safe to others to the point of becoming invisible-who then later shows up abruptly as a creep.

Recently, I was seeing a sex worker, and even with her, the same pattern persisted. But you cannot draw conclusions from how a patient reacts inside a mental asylum; she only remembers and responds to what happened before she ever ended up there. She was running around in the world farting, and I can’t deduce anything from the smell that reached me-whether it was only for me, or why it smelled like that-because that was all she had left.

I have never successfully hit on a woman-not successfully in the sense of giving myself the chance to express myself openly, or taking the chance when it came from her. Not even once. I’m looking forward to it. I’m in search of beauty.

Those who had style and substance in college, in their nineteens-the cream of engineering college-who had common sense, emotional intelligence, and character not merely as students but as personalities at a world-class level, they used to look up to me. I was their Ronie. I was loved, and I had respect as one of their own. That’s when I realized: character is something. And it has everything to do with heart.

Sometimes I think the problem is not with me or the woman I seek. Sometimes I think it’s in me that I don’t express at all, and sometimes choosing the wrong woman is also true. And sometimes I think it’s the universe which personally hates me. And there is only one solution for that: until the universe shits and flushes, there will be ugly-smelling farts for me.