Monologue of a Boy Asking Suicide to Stop Playing Its Songs of Sorrow

don’t categorize it as aloneness

solitude is me not wanting to enter me

A deserted house

I stop by, I linger, but never enter

This

It’s rather a room I’m inside already

A cell

Life-sentence

Borders that open to hidden ways out the country

Lonely is the world

Without me

I move around this room

My mind, another planet

If this body is not another room

Whose door opens to another door

Then what did Van Gogh want to mean

By this painting, or a copy of it

Hung on the wall of my room

Of a sorrowing man,

When he added, “At Eternity’s Gate”?

The call of death exists in different forms

Sometimes it’s me

Sleepwalking

Touching the walls

Checking for a door

Thinking there is no door out

Sometimes, it’s this painting

Begging to be turned into a mirror

But I open my eyes

For the world is lonely without me

Mandela in a cell

I move around this room

I read a paragraph

Then look at where my foot is about to step

The book, a map

Tiny, tiny roads that raindrops trace on the window glass,

a map of their mourning

But I neglect the map and all the roads it suggests

The road every suicide walks over and over again

Depression is a road into the mouth of a wound

And

Here

Alone

Every raindrop hits the window glass

And leaves many of them

Open mouths suggesting to swallow my pain

End this sorrow for you

Song of sorrow

Because dawn has taken long to come

Suicides turn their eyeballs inside out

To look for light inside the dark void

Of

their hearts

The paintings in their rooms are mirrors

Mirrors of sorrow and pain

And there are many of them

Sorrowing Old Man

Peasant Sitting by the Fireplace

Worn Out

Old Man with his Head in his Hands

Mourning Woman Seated on a Basket

I don’t condemn Van Gogh for walking that road of grief over and over again

It’s a malady

The waves of a lake that will vomit you thrice

Before the lake learns to swallow your loads

But

Here

Alone

I choose to ignore the sorrowing man’s sobs

A bullet in the gun

A dagger on the table

Death’s call

there is another call

in the fireflies asleep

Waiting for a footstep to wake them

I choose to open my room

And let the world be my guest

I will offer this

My sorrow

Ask the sky to plant the sun

In a world lost to darkness

Note

Sorrowing Old Man, Peasant Sitting by the Fireplace, Worn Out, Old Man with his Head in his Hands, and Mourning Woman Seated on a Basket are paintings and drawings by Van Gogh