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

Alain Jules Hirwa lives and writes in Kigali, Rwanda. Five of his poems are upcoming in the Kilimanjaro Voices of the University of Benin. Two other poems are upcoming in Jalada 8: Bodies. His short story ‘Race in Relation to Sex’ was published in Welter at the University of Baltimore. His articles appeared in Igihe, the national leading newspaper.