The Houses of the Holy

In this room of sacrilege, this room of devotion

The doorknob gleams with sunlight.

There is a way out of here.

And the knob turns

And lives turn

And doorknobs and lives turn

As they will

By the unseen hands of stars;

Call it fate.

The way that things turn out

Can be called nothing else but wyrd.

Place yourself inside this room, under key,

With the door locked.

The clock on the sunlit wall, if there were a clock,

Waves as if it were floating in an ocean of space.

Watch it silently

Spill its endless flow of seconds

Into a roaring moment

Leading to the doorknob of

The Houses of the Holy.

At the bottom of mountains

Of skyscrapers,

Beside wide rivers

Of metropolitan streets,

Running through vast canyons

Of concrete,

Time in the Houses of the Holy

Is replete at the bottom of sleep

Where life flows as life will flow

Between  anger, lust, and languor
As seconds pass

In the Houses of the Holy

Doorknobs gleam like the sun.

The ceilings are like heaven,

Sinks are like baptismal fonts,

Chairs are like thrones, couches like pews,
Tables like altars.

Sometimes in the hot afternoon

Poems are written by disconsolate poets
Who know they are damned

And surrender to the mid-day

Need for sleep and dreams, dreams

That are less oppressive than

Having to be awake through the horror

Of uselessness.

In rooms of personal sacrilege

Lying on bed sheets like a dirty river,

Casually watching the tumid water

Of shapelessness flow on by their pillows,

One eye on the piling debris brought down

The current of lost will

That gather in the eddy at the edge

Of Chinatown.

The carpet in this room is smudged with cigarette burns

To midnight blackness, as if a thousand stars of ill fate

Fell out of the sky upon it,

A carpet that like a turbid river runs throughout

The corridors and rooms of the grimy St. Paul hotel.

Unendingly comes a waterfall of seconds

Cascading  down these bedroom walls

Plunging into pools of sleep running

Through the streets.

While we are alive,

Floating through the absence of being

We call our lives,

A fiery radiance burns on the doorknob

That leads out of this place

If it’s the last thing we do in

The Houses of the Holy