Hotel Jerome

Staircases leading up
the old mining town,
now a town of ghosts,
not ghosts so much,
people in some kind
of haze. So many steps
to climb and they resist,
step in your way, but she
makes this place her hairdo


Set aside the residents
who fail to rhyme, act
upon their ghosts inside;
summoning the angels
who roll on scant radio
clattering on the street below

The city is falling off her back
and the dark daemons of Jerome
lust and burn, kept in tow.
Every feminine hijink
is working in bouncing,
pairs unbound, every
blitzed biker in the bar
locked onto the information
of her strawberry hips:
You out of love, into fear,
become the charmer,
drawing in the lusty,
flies licking, stuck on honey.

O, do keep your dearest near,
‘cause the next day, I rise,
look up the hotel second-floor
window, up to you,
the porcelain sheen shy as your lips,
glitters, graceful, in morning light,
I quiver and crawl, take photos
of two birds on the wire,
wonderin’ which one was right.

The rolling of the radio
clatters onthe street below
I lust and burn and dream
of return to Hotel Jerome,
knowing I will be there,
with you or alone like
a lost thing, counted
but forgotten, coughed up,
lost things spinning, in flames,
lost things, rotten things,
rusted things, the dead stare:
Stupid little things, the blue fame,
a memory, a cool lamp
at the bottom of an empty beer can.

We left as bits of corrugated
rusted metal, cut and bled,
needing tetnus from the gash
upon our hands.