Hotel Fragments

Terror in the rumbling of the great river I cross every morning on my commute, talk radio a little bit louder, I’m a little bit nervous, shaking it off well into lunch, still nervous, still not totally comforted by the grey and beige. Wine at home, wife comments on replacement of my old beer. Snow is piling up outside. I saw a woman dancing fires atop the hood of my car from the office window. I try to ignore such things. I have dreams after dreams of the river. Curtains pierced by needles, borders dissolved and waters flooding in, deserts springing vital into swamplands. Rolling over in cotton sheets, trying to ignore the pounding rain. Driving through the dark highway, trying to ignore the isolation. Hiding in the hotel, trying to ignore the inhuman footsteps in the hall outside. I turn the radio a little bit louder, crossing the river again on my way to work. I try to sing along and pray it all works out as the river becomes harder and harder to ignore.

Repetition of songs long repeated in the afterlife, strung out and dehydrated a head without water. A Garden of Earthly Delights. Summer haze over the sand sand pours through pictureframes flooding the art gallery choking drowning. Cocaine hangover nightstand music rock n roll “look up here man, I’m in Heaven.” Motorcycle outside Reno desert rolling don’t stop believin into the sunset something in the crankshaft 1978 guitar squealing motors deafening dying smoking outside the beerstained bar and the bitch won’t leave me alone. Death in Wyoming, sickness in Hawaii, sleeping in New York.

I am a shattered vase. Flashing light in the eyes sirens whirring dead between streetlights fuzzing in death-release DMT visions of the world warping and falling to white light and the whole of the world awakens God beckons after crack still echoing between the canyon downtown wet concrete cold in the hot night losing feeling, losing sight. I am a lake of fire. Car squeals top heavy nearly rolling around every corner thrusting my wrist outwards with every trigger pull like I’m throwing punches through the plastic contraption cracks ring out from the centerfiring cartridges flying colors everywhere world melting molly-oil sweat beads doublestrength on the skin of my man and the smell of the iron, the smell of the sulfur, the smell of the burning power liquor on my lips, ethanol burn against the stained-paper of the world. White cloth holes burned in portals to terrorworlds with cigarettes pressed against silken sheets, A Thousand Little Empty Spaces where souls snuffed out and gone to n

Snow howls. The sky is dark. Mute light crunches into the bed of crystalline sand every time you step, footprints vanishing within hours, the wind threatening to scrub you off, sanding and abrading the landscape smooth and empty. We are somewhere hostile to life, neither of the ground nor sky, an aberration against the both absence and presence. I was inside the metal cubes of piped-in warmth and electric comfort when the land was driven up. The snow beneath your feet goes on forever, compacted deeper and deeper. The sky goes up and up, atmosphere escaping, forever. Between infinities of depth, sideways is the only realm we have to ourselves. Particles reform when motion animates the thin boundary between two absolutes. Our human realm between is a world of struggle begetting winds, dunes, crevasses, us pathetic wretches who cling to life in a world that despises even death, despises anything short of a bluntly simple duality. The wind howls hate, the dunes form in anger, as the sky re

Daylight breaks and awake fuck me open split egg-cracked over the rim of a skillet and dribbling down when the lawnmower starts screaming over the summertime humidity jungle forming in condensation raindrops I’m inside a snowglobe emptied of winter cold heating heating heating the petroleum burning and only getting hotter water boils in a glass my sweat is total my skin is red I’m already stewing and liquifying before the day began,10am. Lawnmower screams through the thin siding of the house, lawnmower screams through posters mounted on drywall thin space with paltry fiberglass insulation and plastic trinkets spread across the bedsheet top and particle-board furniture old game consoles and a broken tv and last night’s soda and i reach for another coke and pour it down my throat reaching for something new, something powerful, something cold, a wind blowing to keep me away to deafen the noise to bring me peace. Hot wet grass hot wet trees dry sandy ground muddy water in low points tennis

Picture yourself on a boat on a river. Lucy on the buildingtop downtown looking for spiders. Spiders across the sky networks transmitting something sinister gridlines etched into the globe’s atmosphere, world looking up in awe, world looking up in terror, prices are adjusted dynamically to account for changing market conditions. Lucy on the airport roof looking for spiders. Spiders across the sky silverjets screaming passengers interior gutted to house billions over hundreds. Lucy in the stormdrain looking for spiders. Looking for the ghost of a teenage girl hanging from the underside of a manhole cover over the bottomless pit. Knee deep in rainwater, flashlight shining up at bloody dress, pale legs, cold rainwater pouring into nothing. Someone is rambling to Lucy, Lucy is ignoring, searching. Lucy has been awake for twenty-six hours looking for a staircase to the fluffy white clouds and now this bitch won’t shut up? Following Lucy around. Yammering about something stupid. This bitch w

3pm Sick with the leering smiles of the dragon carved in junglewood dangling off a nail. God Blessed Girl hung around the fake-gilding of the entrance, where the waiter was waiting on his phone, carrying herself bummed cigarettes in her stained fingers, dirty hair sticking out of the underside of a baseball hat, looking eyes dangerous around the parking lot, over the sunlight hot across the reflected steel of the girdered powerlines, railroads down the overgrown trees and high grasses. She smelled like rust and TV static, catching us as we tried to leave. “The fuck are you two doing here?” She caught us as we tried to leave. My brother and I halted, unable to continue past her words. “Afternoon date. In the mood for chinese.” My brother said. “That’s fake. You and I know both know that’s fake. Which one of you is even the real twin? I see you around so often - you’re never apart. You never talk to anyone. I don’t think you’re real. But which one of you is the real one? I can’t tell. It

Orange paneling golden wood perching on vermillion carpet overlooking vaulted windows paned against the horrid day, sky leering through the clouds at the vestige of the old world, the prince returned to the womb.   Sickly light of cloudy day dawn, where grey skies turn autumn morning putrid and stale, air suspending dust like a sandstorm frozen in a single moment, the atmosphere more time than oxygen.   Ancient paper, leatherbound books with pages that crumple to nothing at the touch.   Coat of arms faded, paint splintering into thick air until we can’t remember anything except the metal hanging over the facade.   The prince and his ancestors, incestuous in a retread of old victories, old glories, his living souls suspended in the past like insects trapped in amber. An old house held up by the density of near-unbreathable air, old servants animated by the same occult plasma as ghosts. Ruffed collar stained with vomit. Doctors biting their tongue on an opinion the patient won’t take, st

The kind of afternoon where the sky turns rococo, deep oil tones of pink and gold on blue infinity filtering the sunlight of god while the moonlight of magic emerged from all the little shadows between the shoulders of crowding angels. Tyrant was on his way, predatory-forward stalking down the sidewalks and grass. Retarded baby bimbo queen relaxes on the balcony of her McPalatial McMansion bedroom, where the clouds are all shades of pink and orange, where the sun drips honey-sweet. Tyrant is stalking down the green looking for hard iron and wet concrete. The queen is waiting listlessly losing herself into the sky. Tyrant is stalking down the green covered with dew, his clothes covered with mud. The queen regent is watching the same clouds downstairs, something like their house, fake pillars, behind that same rococo sunset. Tyrant is stalking down the grass letting the music turn into white noise. The queen can’t hear anything over the all-treble mix of her CD player. Tyrant is stalking

Relax on the grass in the end of summer half-heat where the hazy freedom of pure humidity drops all foggy and still over the opiate-latchkey times, relax on the grass with the sun drawn down and blue coming up still illuminated from the horizon, stars showing up gemstones on an ocean’s surface, astral currents running across. Look up from the grassy hill, dew soaking into our clothes, fall backwards, hand in hand. Play a little dance of mutual desire bounced off each other’s defenses. Relax a laughing kiss in the moonless starlight.   I love you, brother. Run with me, through the green turned nightly blueblack, turf grid of cul-de-sac hedgerows and lawns, over wooden fences, alleys with NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH signs nailed on every scrap of post. Run through the emptied parking lots, streetlights on streets no one walks down, paranoid houses looking nervously into the darkness of their two lane roads, lights playing off in tiny moonbeams, teenagers huddled up in bed with the blue light of a

HOME for the time being, what pretends at safety in the tundra, drywall slatted polymerized wooden frame, a hollow body run through with poison and electricity. I have the run of the place, stuck offensively like a tent in the empty, long beyond where the city ends, looking out the window across the plains silent to the horizon. A false home in a permafrost that violently rejects any attempt to put down a foundation like this. White walls and white lights, the illumination so basic it makes your skin crawl. In the rooms we unpack, it feels like the cloistered office of a doctor, windowless, the interior of an egg speckled with personal effects and consumer-grade colors and chemistries. Night falls, out here it’s blackness, grey ground, brown soil, little specks of snow adorning like ashes standing outside, wind whipping ten feet into the backyard so violent to throw you onto the ground. I’m hurrying inside while some mysterious polymer congeals into a more palatable form. Yellow over t

FAR FUTURE, BAJA CALIFORNIA SUR - In empty skies, grey storms of late afternoon, chill of an impending storm descending ominously over the tropical landscape beyond, I awoke alone. Laying still in bed, I could see the shore, a sliding glass door that opened out to descend to the beach, waves crashing grey, a fjord’s foaming break on the sand, the aquarian blue only a distant memory of sunrise forgotten and obscured. Beneath the growing stormclouds, the sun was descending terminally, below the horizon to nothing beyond, no moon, meet the horizon and end of sentence. I could see the tundra stretching beyond the ocean, the desert that gets colder and colder, an Earth without sunlight, the long sleep where we trudge on, awake every last minute as our skeleton is stripped bare in the cold as cold as cold can get, the same pain forever until we forget what warmth is… I’m waiting, watching the stormclouds, waiting for the chaos. Waiting for the world to be without form and void, waiting for a

Take your car service up the great crumbling interstates until you reach those seldom-used exits to the off-downtown districts that always seem suspiciously good at deafaning the urban noise. Run a great expensive tab on someone else’s money. Take notice of your surroundings. Feel the fake trees, taken from a museum, it was replanted here along the parkway where every car is zero emissions, every dogwalker clean of sweat, even the grime of help washed off down sub-street level service entrances where an awestriking basement can cleanse even the deepest impoverishments. Pull up to the curb and let the valet whisk it away to some rebar cavern out of sight & mind. The man will welcome you. There’s a portal to hell in the basement. You take one last look at the trees, museum pieces hand-carved out of jungle mahogany with artificial plastic leaves they spray gold in the autumn, rooted into shovelholes trenched along the asphalt. The master sleeps upstairs in surgical-scrub bathrobes pre

Three blind dogs were eating loud burgers and drippy-oiled fries on the opposite side of the restaurant. The eldest had his porcine face deep-slathered in the fat of the land as he sucked down a corncola. The middle one was delicate, fries quaffed in like caviar on gilt china. The youngest timidly poked at handfuls, masturbating in a deep pit of himself. “I know what they did.” My date turned to me, hiding our glances in conversation. “Did I ever tell you what they did?” “No. Under the yellow lights? Tell me what they did.” “It was under the yellow lights.” They were three marching proud as siblings in a row, middle child flanked by the bookends. They were hot, baking in their element, among the tropical fugue, neon lights bzzbzz to shine discoglow on the skinny prostitutes contorting their bodies to flash hips and nips at the music of money. The middle child was glowing, beaming smile, as he picked up a baby and thrust it into the burning GODSUNLIGHT above his head, blinking eyes of t