Bedroom

My bedroom is my loneliness:

Curtained, lamp lit---a rosy hue,

The nightstand lacking a decent, framed photograph,

Ophelia in the riverbed pinned to the wall

Over an unmade bed with a lone indented pillow,

Clothes astray like flotsam on a beach

And not a single footprint about the whole expanse.

I should open a window, let in some noise

Or invite someone to stay the night.


Somehow, it doesn't feel right,

Allowing someone into my room.

Author's Note

Older piece just found in my archives. Must have been under a "bell jar" that day. It's always interesting to see one's progression through writing. I tried to edit this as well but found I would rather trash the whole thing and start anew with different material so it comes laissez-faire.

Reviews

[David Lewis Paget]

Into your room? ....or into the hidden recesses of your mind? Could it be that a close encounter with a human, any human, would seem a violation of your personal space? I sense a desperate loneliness here, self-inflicted as a result of past horrors and mesalliances. To retreat from the world is to shrivel up and die. We need to open ourselves to external influences if we want to grow.

[Revery]

What dwells under that hard exterior? Is it closed up private places like bedrooms. Do our personal most intense emotions make poetry. Out of things we would have no other chance to speak out load. Your verses test this question. I like to know what dwells in the private more personal places in others heart, therefore I like it.

[Moineau]

Under a "Bell Jar." : D

The ambivalence of longing and an unwillingness to give up one's sovereignty -- one of life's intrinsically cruel dichotomies. I glance at the empty picture frame myself. I would love to see an image there but prefer it stays empty rather than fill it with compromise, regret and the type of remorse that concrete images seem to trend to. The image worth looking at perhaps has no image -- or perhaps it comes "laissez-faire" -- and that really isn't so bad. I'm feeling the French Poet on that one:

"Night! You'd please me more without these stars
Which speak a language I know all too well --
I long for darkness, silence, nothing there.

Yet even shadows have their shapes which live
Where I imagine them to be, the hordes
Of vanished souls whose eyes acknowledge mine."

Merci. Keep writing and keep sharing.