12 Poems From Hotel Rooms In 2016

New York 1625

You are a wrecker you city
Scrambled egg skies
Over jagged brick
and wind from a million feet walking

Hungover in a hipster aerie
I am yet again careening
Soft white light bounces
vivid on hard white walls

Brooklands 315 

The banking is broken,
Grassy patchwork visible
As the light lifts at 5 a.m.
You could park a car there today

Let the natural reclamation
Do all your braking, turn-in

Tokyo 4703 

It turns out that poems about hotel rooms
Are poems about drinking.

This low fog from a high vantage
Follows me everywhere.
Tee-shirt hangs on me hard

And beer-ooo the sneak
Smells the tricks on me.
Can I sleep?

Can I bludgeon this sky place Into understanding.
Can I care long enough
With a deep pillow holding my hesitant head?

Portland 6025 

I left Vonnegut splayed on the 
Bedside stand. 

Returned to a bookmark, and a note 
About love, and wincing guilt. 

The book is the book. 
But do you remember wild driving To the coast? 

A tape deck magical 
And hot humming new music 

For the beach, sandy, blown, drifting. 
A break in the weather and I'm gone. 

Open-doors to the pearl, the honeypot 
Of western memories, 

A bandit as you sleep 
That's a friend forgot.

New York 3005 

I didn't hear a human speak
But through a telephone, all day 

This place misses smoke, and smoking
You can tell right off. Pictures hung like you bought them 
Not like they were taken,
or given to you You've been here.

A dark room with linen
So fragrant - but conspicuously not of laundry
Soap - that you pause at the door.

Human made place refuses to feel like people.

Montauk 404 

The ocean has nothing on the air conditioner
Whooshing iced, purple waves before
The balcony door. 48 hours of this robot battery,
I'm spent.

Kneebones achy under three blankets
As starfish flip wrinkled pinwheels a foot off
The shore.

Austin 427 

Your friends are right outside
Gleaming in the night sweat
Off Lake Travis.

We're all missed.

Texas has a hard stare almost-40-year-old
A dense dust connecting where-I-am
With who-we-are. And we-shall-be. 

You stopped smoking

In the seconds my grey t-shirt dampened to black.
A good move for living.
A great grownup hombre that we all resent.

Chicago 1901 

The expense-account steak house
takes silent delivery

At an exceptional 6 a.m.
windows won't open

I can't smell the lake
only see fishes boxed in ice and salt

Paris 211

Buskers pass two girls
On a lunchbreak;

Younger so pretty she's
A heartbreak + cigarettes.

You know when you can smell something Just looking at it? When you can touch a wall And know it's heart? Ima one level over the street girl Echoing

Chapel Hill 402 

This bricked corner
Won't care if I send an angry email
Take it back
Or close my purple eyebacks and rub my head

Sandstone in the Middle West
Strange as this argument all alone
Where I am doesn't matter
They play the getaway music, you run

West Hollywood 501 

There's a bomb under the bed
Nightfallsacoming

And wind like a train at the beck

Hollywood's harassed
By watery blue skies aday

But say this, dusk time
Say this, nighttime
The apeshit princes

That run this street don't run quiet

Seville 616 

The man sang
One foot on the platform
One foot on the train

Echoed, a refrain, down
An interior courtyard
A sometimes quiet vessel

Spain is too much night
Soft rocking guitar
From bar doors that close close

Night is too much grasping
Of a final trip
Of a last, fast falling ride home

How To Survive In The Jungle (With A Tiny Song For Flowers)

Capture water and hold it close to your heart,
where the sticky
mass of your body’s blood
can contain criminal secrets. Can hold hostile
hot terrain under a bottom lip like spitup.

Capture water and let it flood in under your skin,
where the pocket
moisture of your dermal underbelly
can sustain its want. Can protect voyeuristic
urges from bubbling up to the surface.

Oh flower! My life for a day in your roots! My fortune for a whisper of your nectary!

Capture water and careen forward like a broken branch,
where the force
of your bailing carbonated bits
can burrow under the soft earth. Can effervesce
minerals in the service implacable condescension.

One In Which I Dream Hotly While Naked Abed

The wet creak you mixes
with a muffled miss-hearing
(due my riot of breath-warm
blankets, smelling of human nakedness)
for a fast fading tropical vision
of mystery.

There you are, delicate hombre,
hiding your weakness beneath the
drooping damp of a stout, heavenward
bromeliad.

There you go, mincing in mild
angelic hops the dreamscape
of what I know to be real;
flashing a roil of greens and reds

in the dissipating umber of a Michigan
cold-bottomed bedroom.

More Than A Feeling

Improbable Canadian rocker (he may be from Flint or Inkster)
working gate 49 in Delta's terminal, blows cereal and Merit Lights
and half a bottle of warm Pepsi at me as I ask about my Austin flight.

Blonde pageboy/mullet has been swung in love. We've no doubt
spilled beer on each other's shoes in the elbow-close confines of good
smoking bars, drawn heroic inspiration from the same jukeboxes

been staggeringly charming for half-my-size women who didn't deserve it.
I catch that his name is Marc, and guess that it kills him each morning to tuck
in that triple ex el white uniform shirt, belt on navy slacks against the heavy

push of Molson-made guts and go to fucking suck dick at DTW all day.
Long deep drinks of coffee, in to-go mugs with busted tops, are shared
luxury, and briefly humane. Marc's gate desk is six inches too short

for him. My chair is hard-backed and busted and we both could stand
to get drunk.

And It Don’t Stop

First snow
rests light
outside our
thin window

Wake up
The weather
is alive
and trying

to speak
You’ll miss
This shit
When you’re

dead man
Get shoveling
And snow
get melting

It’s early
December My
god it’s
still early

to hold
cold clotting
my head
and bones

I’ve a
hard, hot
craving Water
to be

cool wine

A Prayer Before Shaving

You might just consider it, one,
when your close mirrored face
is red-line-y about the eyes
And Tuesday morning just cracked
open hard like a can shook.

Things are happening below
the nose, that, when last night
filled up with assholes and doffed
corks and mislaid complements,
may have seemed immaterial

but we know that that isn’t true.

Steam clouds the bathroom.
Sits slick on still chilly tiles
as two wooden hands creep
up to do the deed you always regret.

Matchison Terminal Blues KO

He slipped on a sure-fire herringbone
jacket before he slipped on the floor.
Get noticed, meet people,
see the world.

See the world from the floor looking up
he guesses. Watching skirt
corners flap away
to the bus.

His pants were dampened, dirtied from the wet
spot; where you are going, how you get there.
Stand up fast before you’re laughed
at by girls