Every walker has a stick. His lies beside him, a lover
broken from a broom, on which he carves each night's moon phase
making a scrimshaw calendar below her palm-smoothed head. She's no more relaxed
in this air-conditioned room than under concrete park benches, staring from her
pillow, ready to defend his skeleton.
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,
the vacationers screaming toward roller coasters,
the teens racing to stand solo and empty-faced against screaming parents;
their hands fidget, wanting their lovers' sweaty thighs and armpits.
He'll squirrel away the packet of the room's complimentary grounds.
They can later be mixed with a bathroom's hot tap and an empty pop can:
the rotgut of wakefulness. But now he's still covered by the chlorinated cotton
sheets making white dunes of his head, butt and fetal legs.
All in all, it is a melted Guggenheim waking up, just 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, a nude Alexander before the opaque blinds, grasp their wand,
twist,
and receive the luminous earth.