homebound
incense
Guggenheim
carved
luminous
fidgity
coffee
rotgut
sheets
freshen
Homebound
Last night he slept in a motel
called "The Meeker Arms" because it faces
Meeker Street. The graying Indian sniffed, but
cash rents rooms, and incense later freshens them.
Every walker has a stick. His lies beside him, a lover
broken from a broom, and carved with each night's moon phase.
Her bare head stares at him, coquetishly unembarrassed by her tattooed calendar,
ready to defend his skeleton, no more relaxed
in this air-conditioned room than under concrete park benches.
His final dream includes the coffee vapor that leaks in
from the hall. It's 8:49. RV families and fucked out teens
have already boiled the complimentary Folgers, cursed shower water
that requires unending tampering, dozens of hands coordinating a
Buddhist balancing act of scalding and freezing, but never the
collective warm nirvana. They've groped bagles and bolted for roller coaster
rides, the vacationers screaming toward parks, the teens racing to stand
solo and empty-faced against screaming parents; their hands fidget,
wanting their lovers' sweaty thighs and armpits.
He'll drink the Continental coffee downstairs, and squirrel away the room's grounds.
They can later be mixed with a bathroom's hot tap and an empty pop can: the
rotgut of wakefulness. But now, his toes shake. The threadbare
cotton sheets still cover his head, butt and fetal legs.
All in all, it is a melted Guggenheim on the bed, just now remembering the
luck of a found wallet, the presidents within who can offer it a week's endowment.
This edifice contains a modern art of stepping on gravel, pinning jean flies,
sleeping with truck beds of sheep or watermelons, and not begging, not
doing that, because once you beg you're guilty of the sin of dependence and
you don't deserve to slide out the side of your queen, collect your wooden
lady, stand like Alexander before the opaque blinds, grasp their wand,
turn,
and receive the luminous earth.