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