Just a Little Room by Antonia Alexandra Klimenko

                                                                  Just a Little Room 

I sit here in my little garret, once a servant's quarters, and wonder who served whom and how, and what thoughts he or she might have had in this space before me.  Obviously, we have the room, itself,  in common, but do our airy reflections share common ground as well?– the space for instance, or lack of.  The walls have certainly held up their end quite nicely, as has the floor–what little there is of it, but the room with its small portal on the world is more than modest by most standards.  However, might someone else have thought this the grandest place ever by comparison to even tinier cells that weren't lived in so much as previously endured   If it is true that All is energy that never dies...are his or her ideas still floating around the room and visiting mine in my sleep or have they slipped through the crack in the skylight, and are, at this very moment. on the other side of the world painting on a beach in Tahiti with Gaugin's primitive palette, or on a mountaintop in India sitting at sunset with Gandhi's spiritual revelations.  Assuredly, more than a few would just as soon hang out here in Paris with Sartre or Beauvoir at Cafe Flore, or dare I say, even the likes of me.  Not that I've said or written anything terribly significant as of late (certainly, not in the last paragraph) but, I am, like anyone else, visited by a few entertaining and gracious thoughts that serve well on occasion.  And, if the walls do have ears, which utterances have gone the distance to find their energetic way into the tiny crevices?  All?  Only the louder exclamations? or did the loving whispers and devotions of a higher vibration leave an even deeper impression. If the walls do have eyes, mightn't they glimpse and sense the aura of what presently adorns and inhabits their immovably moveable and invisible landscape. 

I, for one, have always imagined that Someone is watching me...watching over me.  It keeps me on my better behavior, if you will.  'Better' not qualifying as terribly good, just better than what might otherwise be.  As for space–having dispensed with time in my own fashion (a very long time ago) – I have learned to recreate it...the sense of it, having accepted the invitation of and having, in turn, invited a mysterious, Eternal energy to vibrate inside of me.  With that in mind, may I add, I enjoy, at present, a small room, but a rather spacious one at that. One that speaks to me...Yes, dear Reader, it spoke to me that very first day, not in words of course, but the spaces...the silences in between.  It might have been the golden sunlight streaming through the skylight–the energy of the dust that had yet to settle and seemed to sparkle like stardust in the dark. It might have been the bells that rang a dozen times as I crossed its threshold, the small cross that was left on my doorstep, how each item found its own place as if it had always lived there.  It might have been a thousand and one things that I could see and even hear, but it was more the feeling I had when I entered it. I felt as if it entered me, as if its presence were something felt internally, as if ,  as if...  it were now living inside of me. A haunting thought.  Oh thank God, I think, it's just a little room. But oh, how I am wrong!  It is, in fact, a veritable mansion that speaks volumes and whose echo has yet to return!  And, at the rate I am going it may well take me forever to cross to the other side!    

( Anotonia Alexandra Klimenko is Poet in Residence for SpokenWord  Paris at the Chat Noir , see link below. She has been living in the city for many years now and has been writing and performing her poetry for as long as she can remember. This prose poem shows another side to her writing, I was reminded of Baudelaire's poems in prose Le Spleen de Paris. With many thanks to the author for allowing me permission to publish her work here with the accompanying photo - which is the same room, described, with a view.)

https://spokenwordparis.org/writer-in-residence-antonia-alexandra-klimenko/