The Room by AM Kamaal (19, Nigeria)

The room is seasonal:
There is autumn. There is spring.
There is winter, and the cool summer.

The room is natural:
Every beauty, and the curiosities
Of God reside here
In front of my bare sight.
​
The room is spiritual:
There is faith. There is belief.
There is a claim of belief, and whiteness, and
Purity. There are genuflections,
Clappings, and the silence, sobbing
In the brightest corner of an atheistic mind.

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The room is circumferential:
A part of the room hates perspectivism.
The other part just doesn't care.

The room is also emotional:
There is love, and there is faith.
There is loathing. There is you:
The most beautiful thing on Earth.
I envy everything your presence commands.
I, like everyone else, was once told
Without listening to the talks that
Lives change in the courtyard of love.

The room is spacious, and emotional:
It accommodated and outlived our ancestors.

The room is colourful.
Or colourfilled: there is a colour called dark.
Or darkness. There is white. Or whiteness.
There is red. There is beautiful.
There is lilac. Difference is the heart of colours.
I live in this room, but I was told to look
Up on the wall. That I would find the dancing
Shadow of the Lord, painting stillness.
The colour of the shadow, well, is not dark,
Nor black. It is just a colour,
Meaning perfection.

The room is spacious:
I live there. He lives there. And she
Lives where I live, and where they live.
I crave silence, but silence also
Lives here beside everyone.
I see something in everyone's eyes
When the night comes to stay
In this same room: it's not sleep, but
The temporal-ness of the inevitable.
The inevitable lives in this room,
With us, too.

The room is not: nothing
Like the imaginations of the spiritual
In our heads: the He God.
The room is not: silent
Like you. Me. Him. & Her when our tongues
Are being stripped off of their self-esteem. &
Our feet, tucked inside immobility.

The room is available:
For cruelty. For compassion. &
Comparison. For deception.
For art. For science. For philosophy.
I write this poem in this room
With poetry, lurking around the April
Of this room as sentiment would
On the insecure mind. The room is:
Available for you. For me. For those
Who would make it unavailable
For you. & me no more.

The room is dynamic:
There is an eclipse, or two, or more
In the room. There are old volcanoes,
Erupting on the table of the room.
There is geography. There is philosophy:
The Milesian school was built in the room.
Sigmund Freud, Frank Sinatra once spoke
In the room with Ezra Pound &
Bertrand Russell writing life.
“There was," in the future we'd say,
Beside the gentleness of Jesus Christ,
Or what not, “everyone in the room."

The room is an abode of sound:
Another form of sound is silence.
Silence is an unheard sound.
Sadness is a sound. Sorrow is a sound.
Happiness is a sound. & envy: the most
Silent sound. Love is a beautiful sound.
And determined achievement:
They all chime silently, or pretty loudly
In the room. Even the room is a sound
Of itself.

The room is an embodiment of questions
Of itself. Of me. Of you. Of everyone
Born naked. The room would ask:
What is my purpose of embodying both
Darkness, and the integrity of noon?
I would ask: what am I doing here,
In the room? You would ask: what is it
That I am here for? The day we were born
As naked as the time before the Genesis
Would ask genuinely: Why am I just a day?
Why is it that only my clients could
Determine my significance? Everyone,
Even the room, would ask
In a very accurate, singular voice:
Where are the face, and hand of my architect?

The room is the room:
There are rooms in the room.
There are rooms beside the room. &
There are rooms beside the rooms
In the room. There are houses
In the room. There are lands, but
Only, like the moon, one home
With different onomatopoeias
With different paradoxes and metaphors.
The room is source of the figuratives:
The accommodator of the sun, and the scorched.
​
Now, each day we sleep in the room,
The room dies. & our breath is deducted
Every day except tomorrow.
The room is the proof of inductive reasoning:
& then, in this incrementally fading room,
We exhaust our breath just because
The room has once accommodated, &
Outlived our ancestors too.