Darkness Is This Hotel

The stairs, tipped-over

Still go down smoothly

Like blue ruin

And each step

Though only a minor accident

Quickly spills

Like a sole bottle tipped over

Boiling out with the last sip

Of tumbling, desperate life.

Past squalid shadows,

Gross and sedentary

Feeding like vermin on my life

The walls of this room suffer an affliction

Of shadows that increase nightly

Like unfumigated pests

A swarm and welter 

That never rest,

Evading all attempts to crush them

That would squeeze

The mood

Of death right out of them.

Yet all I constantly see are dripping shadows

Inside the water-seeped walls of my mind

Of pipes that need fixing

The window just a leap away

Onto the collapsed balcony

Of rusting, filth strewn fire escape

But the escape

Is no escape
No escape at all. .  

Look  upon those stairs; they are eaten

Each one caught in a slow process

Of digestion,

A metabolism of hell.

Halls of this hotel a vast intestine

Devoured by the mouth of a door

A stomach of green walls and bowels of green carpeted floors

Evacuated down a rickety fire escape

This place within burnt down so many times

By flames of despair but always rebuilt

And let out to human hazard once more

Barbed ledges, simulacrum of owls

To chase away the cooing scavengers

That perch there nonetheless, defecating

Foraging the crumbs of thoughts

I scatter out the windows

Onto the foul pigeon stoops

Of my soul

As gluttonous shadows of buildings

Spill into the streets

Bending down with the obesity

Of the entire world,

Dripping into human shapes 

Twisted in the light that filters

Down into urban canyons

Aligned like teeth and jaws

Everyman on earth lives in the same room

Yet, in some

Gentlemen

Gather for cigars and cognac

As a private butler, master connoisseur,

Pours a vintage more expensive

Than one’s last breath

Darkness is the hotel

I live in

I’d have to fly if I were ever

To get out of here