Auguste Romain Nyecki Poet Free verse

The Room of Those I Am

I have nightmares,
not those that visit the sleeper,
but those that know his name.
They enter me with the patience of heirs,
rearrange the furniture of my soul
and sit at the table of my thoughts.
I wake up with several men inside my chest.
One believes he owns my birth,
another claims to know my death,
a third sells my identity
for a few coins of reason.
I let them speak:
I am their country, their border, and their prison.

Since childhood, I have carried a windowless room
where a child continues to grow old.
He gazes at his own hands
the way one gazes at a riddle after it has been solved.
He would like to know who taught him how to become himself,
and why his name always feels borrowed.

I live among things that have lost their innocence:
books sometimes teach submission,
palaces give administrative names to chains,
altars transform fear into virtue,
markets put a price on consciences.
Civilized man knows how to count up to his brother’s price.

I have met peoples inside display cases,
arranged by scholars who claimed to understand them.
Their skulls, their lands, their silences were measured,
then what looked like plunder was called progress.
The century put on a brand-new suit,
while the old hunger kept the same mouth.

I think of the dead whom monuments render docile.
Marble lends them a nobility they perhaps never asked for.
The conquerors carve their phrases into the public squares,
then children learn those phrases like prayers.
Stone becomes a professor,
and ignorance is granted a chair.

I no longer know if I think
or if something thinks through me.
My ideas wear invisible uniforms,
my desires sometimes have the voice of a landlord,
my angers know the borders
that my reason claims to have abolished.

I would like to become a stranger to my own certainties,
to inhabit a second before any belief,
to clear out the inherited furniture from my mind,
to make my consciousness an almost empty room.
But man brings his ancient idols everywhere,
even when he believes he has ceased to believe.

Freedom sometimes appears to me like a lock
for which we forge the key ourselves.
We open a door,
then immediately build another prison.
We call this living,
with that comic gravity of the condemned
who write their own rulebook.

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