CONTROLLED EXPERIMENT

The world, endless in its vastness,

Can be a shitty hole, lonely like a gnome

Trapped in an ancient cave…


Or an ecosystem, self-sustaining, flourishing

With warmth exuded by companions,

Friends and strangers.


I’ve been behind the wooden door of my single 

Room for days, sent myself like a rebel into exile, forged 

Enemies out of the many faces of outside world.


It’s a controlled experiment, I am the specimen,

My phone is alive, hale and hearty, but I’ve

Failed to link her up with the flirty internet. 


I am alive, but curious, and one bad thing 

About curiosity, it has a cunning way of  disrupting 

The flow of our inner peace. 


It’s been five days now and counting, exile 

Has been fun, and I’ve unearthed some luminous 

Clans in the country of my body I never knew existed, 




I’ve redefined love as selfhood, say the best form of love 

Is love for self. Just one thing, only one thing has been unsettling 

My black skin, no one, not boyhood friends nor astute colleagues, 


Outside my family circle, dropped by to ensure 

A soul still dwells in one of the rooms in my body.

Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale

Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale is a black poet and an undergrad at the University of Ibadan. He's a Pushcart prize and BOTN Nominee. A 2021 HUES Foundation Scholar and a poetry editor at The Global Youth Review. He prays silently in his heart, that his verses outlive him. He was a finalist in the 2021 Wingless Dreamer Book of Black Poetry Contest, Winner 2021 Annual Kreative Diadem Poetry Contest. His poems have been published in: Brittle Paper, Soundings East Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, ROOM, Watershed Review, Decolonial Passage, Poetry Column-NND, The Westchester Review, The Oakland Arts Review, Subnivean Magazine, Short Vine and elsewhere. He tweets from: AbdmueedA

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The Factor of a One Nightstand