Life’s Rooms Nesting

-One Poet’s Chronicle-

How prescient that first room
where under the bed
light pooled like a secret lake
and a flashlight beam, thin as a sword,
knighted plastic soldiers into destiny,

where the walls breathed softly like a held-in whisper
and monsters kept polite distance at the border of blankets

Came

The room with desk with a door locked like a promise broken twice
where screens flickered blue moth-light,

and avatars wore my courage better than I did.

Parents’ footsteps drifted past like ships in fog
assuming charts and compasses while I mapped other wars.

Came

The SAT room
curtains drawn tight as eyelids
silence thick as snowfall
each question a stone dropped in a well with no echo.

Time stood in the corne, a tall man tapping his wrist
while pencils sharpened themselves into thin little verdicts.

Came

The dorm room,
beer cans crumpled like fallen helmets
a roommate snoring like machinery grinding night into scraps.

Desire moved through air vents,
perfume like a rumor,
hunger misplaced,
Books unopened as closed doors as the body wrote its own curriculum.

Came

A room that never existed,
yet I lived there briefly,
a corridor of mirrors breathing fog Where every version of me
turned just a second too late,

Voices like dripping water asked who arrives
when no one is looking.

Came

The office with walls lacquered in ambition,
glossy as a predator’s eye,
Where deals slid across desks like cards in a magician’s hand,

curtains drawn again,
always those curtains,
light filtered into something obedient,
the air smelled faintly of paper singed at the edges.

Came

A room filled with clocks,
none agreeing,
each face melting slightly like wax reconsidering shape.

There I sat,
A guest without invitation listening to seconds argue.

Came

Marriage’s bedroom,
sheets folding like quiet vows where bodies spoke first
and explanations followed.

A crib appearing like a small continent,
Rising overnight,

Love—wide and unmeasured,
yet framed in portraits hung carefully So nothing would fall.

Duty slipping on like a well-tailored coat,
warm,
heavy.

Came…

Came…

Rooms without doors,
only thresholds you notice afterward.
Fields pretending not to be rooms,
cities closing in like gentle fists,
hospitals humming in fluorescent prayer,

rooms of green patience,
rooms of salt-air forgetting,
rooms stacked skyward where glass becomes another cage

and always four walls somewhere waiting
like the last line of a long sentence until the viewing room

chairs aligned as if expecting a small lecture.

Glass clear as held breath.

On the other side,
a simple chamber steel quiet,
unornamented.

And we gather,

not as audience but as witnesses.

To heat becoming release.

The body—once a thousand rooms—
now lightened into something uncontained.

Flame beginning.
Softly.
Almost kindly.

And through the glass no horror,
only a final architecture dissolving

as if every room had always been a window

that now at last opened.