Wednesday, February 5, 2020

Hotel Proteus



 It can't be real.
This must be all re-imagined. 
Re-imagined”.

 As the wind in the blasted sails wails sail on, sailor.


Main wing, primary staircase off of the street

Check out of here
Before there’s no more nightmare left to pay for this, not even
A bad dream to lay the account to, nothing
To absorb the loss of all occurred
Within the wake of this exhausted ship of a life,`
Blasted sails, barely a shred of timbre left to scale
The waves of stairs mounting toward a corner room.
Sail on, sailor.
Steps of foam rising up from the furor
Of moon-drawn streets folding and unfolding
Into the Protean,
Leading to nowhere.
Leading to where Proteus can’t be found
But the dread gods help him when…

The chorus of stairs
Repeat their tragic iteration,
An old goat song …

“This must all be imagined
It can't be real.
This all must be all re-imagined
Re-imagined”

As the wind in the blasted sails moans sail on, sailor.

Salty carpets a pattern of bubbling sea
Pour nauseatingly through the halls,
Rising past my knees, inundating hip then
Beyond my head, compelling me back into the flood
Of streets, awash in a multiplicity of currents of dreams
But I swim on toward my bedroom
Through halls with mirrors at each end that reveal
All the classical beasts
A Charybdis in each
Sucking and expelling waves in violent storms
Of phosphorescent light.
The entire catalogue of monsters behind them
That all who dwell here know too well;
A Scylla of crushing bedrooms and hallways,
Innumerable Manticores of hostility possessed of
Missile stings of massive scorpions
With rows and rows of lion teeth,
Yet the face of man inside those mirrors.
And countless Sphinxes
Carrying the head and breasts of women ,
Their lion bodies so fine, dining on riddles.
Three-headed Chimeras erupting down the halls 
In volcanoes of silver,
Cyclopes with one eye mirroring the delusions
Of all whom enter here,
Everywhere Basilisks of humiliation, only a foot long,
Able to destroy with just one mere look
Into their inescapable reflection
And the Minotaur of addiction who roams these halls
As they stretch into the devouring labyrinth
Of streets that feast on youths and maidens
A list of monsters too long to mention,
The Erinyes not to be forgotten,
The worst of all in this place
But sometimes is seen
A passing trace of the Old Man of the Sea
For which I come looking for in search of my father
And I came to a vision of the announced and unrevealed, there
A Hero’s son wandering in search of  a Royal House
In search of Answers
A virtual beggar offered hospitality by a king
To whom his paternity he well concealed
Like Telemachus before Menelaus

The Reception Desk

“This must all be imagined.
 It can't be real.
This must be all re-imagined. 
Re-imagined”.

Sail on, sailor.


I, a modern-day Telemechus
In search of the shape-shifter god, the god of illusions and prophecy,
The ancient sea god who would tell me where my Father is

I, awash in a complete loss of Will
And to this briny entrance deposited
Espy a lonely island so long upon the horizon, yet one
So very deep within my mind
A vision ever daily viewed,
The seal covered island of Proteus
And the cave of this seedy hotel
It’s dim light entangled inside a phantasm as I enter
An overlap of weed and wrack endlessly splashed
By the waves of my own madness,
Yet not a mistake as my body drifts listlessly inward on its own
Toward this tiny sea shore
As tiny purple fishes run laughing through my fingers…
Toward the sea cave of a vacant room.
A place dirty and uncouth, a place I can't bear anymore
As I plunge suddenly down upon the melting strand
Of the reception desk
Pecuniary homage, a full day’s sacrifice that will never suffice
And this not the last time to place in golden fire
My day’s wages in exchange for a god forsaken room
A costly steer as incense to this god,
A flaming wallet as proffer to my need for words of prophecy
Come from the Hotel Proteus, a place to write poetry
For that is what I come to this desolate island for.
Words that no earthly ransom will afford, words
I know must be wrestled for

Yet slowly from behind the glimmering desk
A stupid seadog-face towards me swims once more
To accept this hecatomb perforce of his god
To look into its flames and smell that it is good,
Allowing me entrance for one more week to wander in pursuit of Him.

And with an idiot bark and thrash of arm-like fin
He mocks me within my own mock-epic
Pointing in the vague direction of a cove
I have already combed
That I might find Him.

Floor A, 1st wing

“This must all be imagined.
 It can't be real.
This must be all re-imagined. 
Re-imagined”.

Sail on, sailor.

Struggling for place in treacherous waves of sorrow I see
There’s a bizarre fellow down the hall who looks like Edgar Allan Poe.
In the connecting wing there’s a guy I think who resembles Bukosky.
There’s a handsome young fellow around reminiscent of  Rimbaud.
While on another floor there’s an intellectual 
Who bears something in his visage of  Zukovsky
And just above there is woman who greatly reminds me of Plath
Had she lived  past fifty.  I spoke to her one day, just briefly,
As she was headed for her bath, a mere hello, but her gentleness 
Impressed me greatly.
I felt a very magnificent spirit there.

Those who live in this hotel may have never really wanted 
To achieve anything
Nor could they for the Morae didn’t stitch it so
They just feverishly dreamed they did, day after day,
And as they became madder and madder in disrepute
They still pretend
They might achieve something in this world somehow
In their own madness

Could you enter the rooms of everyone here
There would be the smell  of burnt food off their hot-plates
And the scent and scene of dirty clothes piled into a corner
Along with all the rest of the shit of their life
In one tiny, miserable room.

And only death could bring relief
From the tawdry mundaneness of it all.
And yet not the humanly cure
Sought for..  Only money can solve this problem as best it can
And money is worlds away

Everyone here knows the smell of death.
A sweet aroma of sickeningly rotting peaches.
I smelled it here twice wash through the door
As the body of an old seaman was fished from his room
His decaying carcass flavoring the depths of everything
As the coroner's wagon came for him
                               
Floor A, 2nd wing

The thought of dying someday in this place makes
Me sick
As I swim toward my room,
Watching other sailors who have come to Hotel Proteus
Knock on doors in a psychotic haze in search of 
The god of many shapes
Begging for spare change.
But not me
Not begging
For anything that anyone could ever give me.
And as I hear the seals bark from the docks of the Embarcadero,
The answer is forever No.
And you’d have to find me and grab me
By the throat
To get another Answer.

Because I still think, inside the beginnings of this maze, 
Mounting a tragic choir of steps
That I am someone decent and sensible
And as yet, a still very presentable human being
Who, notwithstanding the sordidness surrounding him
Driving him insane, strives carefully
To cultivate healthy daily routines

As the wind lifts the seals’ bark to my door.
Packs of hundreds of seals
I light my torch of poetry and enter further this cave
Because I know
That it was prophecy that I came to explore,
That I would find the god among his seals.
In a place like this

                Floor A, 3rd wing


“This must all be imagined.

 It can't be real.

This must be all re-imagined. 

Re-imagined”.



Sail on, sailor.

But perhaps I should knock on strangers doors. 
 I'd fit in better around here.
But in all sincerity,  I'm not keen to find out 
Who'd be on the other side
Because the odds are stacked like a boomtown casino 
That in this place
They wouldn't be a decent, clear and sensible person.
The eccentrics here aren’t charming. 
What would I ask myself what I wanted to know?
Not to mention what I would ask them.
I'm too sweet for this place
Yet I have the couth, the self-possession not
To wander the halls  or yell out the window at all hours
Like some here.

Outside my door are found the shattered lives 
Of the truly downtrodden,
The city dwellers chronically unemployed or underemployed
And I the same who also has just happened to end up
In the living hell of skid row
Days pass and now over year I've been here searching for 
The god, Proteus.
(Lost cause has reason for despair)

Because I stand upright and with sincerity and correctness
When I walk into this degenerate fleapit of a room
But perhaps I shouldn't.
Perhaps I shouldn't pretend I'm not a failure anymore
Shouldn't pretend I have answers
To very meaningful questions or the courage
To improve  the answers I already have
To find better ones that would alleviate my circumstances,
To find ones that would alter  the horrible fact that I am here.

Because all these doubts deserve to be pounded on
Like the doors of a prison
Because they deserve to be answered and solved

I am afraid I won't be receiving any answers soon because
I am afraid of who would answer
If I knocked on all of these questions.
I need to talk to  the shape-shifter god
Because my life has become a lost cause.
And when I get hold of him…

Fear in other's isn't suffered well
And for someone like myself who lacks the common touch,
Who can't even sell himself to himself
I'm afraid that the results of my importunate inquiry
Would be quite dismal and embarrassing
The lame, well intended question would fall
As humiliatingly flat as this question I weekly ask myself,
"What are you going to do? Rent's due tomorrow".
I struggle to raise the paltry amount it takes to live even here.

Floor B, 1st wing

Everything is otherwise than I would like
This mandala of my life to be
Lost cause has reason to despair
Otherwise
Perfection is happening all the time

Clearly, it's not worked out
Or I wouldn't call this place my address
Otherwise everything is otherwise
Than the way I'd like it to be.
I definitely feel trapped and broken

The Wolf is at the door again.
Otherwise, "perfection is always happening". 
This is what my dear friend, Rick Wolf, sheepishly tells me
When I confess my angst at being here.
He stays in this hovel, too. On the top floor above, 
Along the same edge
Of it as me, with a better overlooking view of
The Insanity
Of the bustle of North Beach/China town/S.F Financial district
An ironic admixture of wealth and poverty, 
The good life and destitution,
Social adjustment and maladjustment
He’s been here much longer than me, 
Down and out much longer than me. 
He seems to deal better with the fact
That this really isn't a place to live.
A Wolf really does come to my door, he is my only visitor
In this place in which I've succumbed to
And as he surveys our furnishings he says the only thing
That a mendicant on the path (as he is) could say.
"perfection is always happening"
We are members of the same caste, the pariahs of art and spirit
Because I live near the edge
Of downtown
And with this key to the this door
I live nearer to the edge of insanity,
Of mental and moral destitution and dissolution,
Mine and others.
Living in poverty is already an accomplished fact
Only my poetry saves me.
Only my poetry keeps me here. 
It is the key to the door of the prison of my life. 
With the power to set me free, it is inescapably a fact
That it is part of the reason that I am here.

This must all be imagined.                 this must all be re-imagined

Floor B, 2nd wing

Poetry is the addiction that brought me here
To be with the rest of these junkies and losers
Poetry is, as I warned when I was younger,
A way to madness and failure

I don't want to be a judas and be the one
Who betrays myself to a life of respectability
I want to be a Barabbas and die beside Christ
Because in all honesty
I see some similarities between Christ and I
They killed him, and now they're trying to kill me
A modern day Sanhedrin wants to hand me over to the Consul,
The corporate governers who oversee the moral laws

I think the only reason I'm maybe still alive
Is because I swing upside down from a rope like St. Paul
With a knot I learned to tie and attach to myself 
Without anyone's help
The rope I abhor
The rope on which I depend for all of my inspiration,
I swing on the rope that sways between ecstasy and dejection, 
Rebellion and abjection,
I look in the thesaurus and find a list synonyms for this last word,
Abjection,
That combined express perfectly my situation:
Wretchedness, misery, desolation, despair, despondence, distress, 
Gloom, unhappiness, abjectness, hopelessness
Antonym: cheerfulness

from this rope of ancient romance
I won't apologize and I can't be corrupted
Therefore, I will be sacrificed by the corporate governers
And die in infamy like a true poet
O' lady in ecstasy, goddess of liberty
Cumming on the parapet walls of the revolution
I pray to thee

All I want is to abide in an elegant suite
And partake of a fine glass of wine
Over the gilded table of polished nature
With my subconscious
And discuss the methods of how to get she and I
Out of  Hotel Proteus,
I want to float in taverns brimming with 
Profoundly enlightened philosophers
And languorous women
And with one just for me
All night- all life
All day - all death
All pain- all ecstasy
Please, o' laday, I pray thee

Floor B, 3rd wing.

In my mind I see a woman
When I walk into this room
Who is not there, one I have always to imagine
If I want her company
In a cheap, seedy room ghosted
By desperation, loneliness, confusion and pain
The foul scent of perspiration filling the halls
The scent of fearful, fleeting strangers in this world
Still lodged cheaply for one more week
Before the possibility of living on the street
But no woman, no woman to erotically greet me
From the bed, the only place to sit in this room
In this room, safely, degenerately
A home
For me and my dreams and demons,
Whom I am in complicity with

All of this must be imagined, or it must be re-imagined.

Because this room
Is as close to the edge of hell
As I want to come
Which I;m afraid might dwell only next door, or on the next floor.
Therefore, I stay put
Because I don't kid myself about
The wholesomeness of my neighbors.
They're fine
Just as long as they
Take their medicine.

This must be...                                      this all must be...
Sail on, sailor.

But I guess this is the way its been done before
The way in which poets live and are born into "legend"
And often die
Amidst the derelicts, the hookers, the boozers and the losers

And the question arises:
Who's room is this anyway?
Is this room like Kerouac's  in the Mission, 
Like Bukowsky's room in L.A?
Or is it older and farther away,
Like something that Verlaine and Rimbaud once shared in Paris,
Or closer to something that Baudelaire might have known,
Or perhaps even similar to one that Villon wrote in.
The places that the poets call home
Have bottles on the floor and the smell of absinthe to them.
Didn’t they stay in this same room?  I think they did, very much so,
Or at least one just like it somewhere in Paris, New York, 
San Francisco, 
Or the City of Lost Angels.
Cities of Death, cities of the fall of human civilization

Yes, they all stayed in this universal room somewhere
For a season in hell 
In this City of Death
In this hotel of ruin, their ghosts still drink and write here, 
Guiding my pen.

The St. Paul is the name of this place.
Jesus Christ, no wonder  it's so fucked up.  What a con man he was! 
It's no wonder, no wonder at all.
Yet I wonder, I wonder a lot.
Because I heard that sometimes people take cockroaches as pets 
And give them names in places like this.
"This is Ralph.  He's special to me"

I wonder what it all means and if
There is an end to this someday
If it gets any less depraved, debased and defiled
This place without grace, enlightenment or salvation
This urban pit of decaying aura.
I wonder why it is all so ugly, 
As if someone purposely went out of their way
To fashion these hideous living arrangements
And I realize that life is too short
To be ugly.  Mine is.

I, a modern day Odysseus, an American poet, in pursuit of home
Yet, who has never given up on finding words to give to Penelope
Who pictured himself a hero on the level with the prince of Thebes
Who, when mature as a poet, would throw the Sphinx into the abyss.
Now it takes what substance of dignity and integrity I have not to throw
Myself into the abyss, but I don't
Because at least one neighbor on this floor did
And missed
Now I go into this room 
And tie myself to the mast of my madness to hear the sirens wail
Tomorrow
From the docks just a couple blocks away
From this sordid hotel entrance
I am going to set sail for the isle of Proteus, 
The sixth moon of Neptune would not be too far to roam
And find the elusive, silent prophet god.
Lounging beside his pack of seals along his sequestered beach 
On his own private island
Living in untold splendor and shameless luxury
In his far corner of paradise

And I'm going to track him down, corner him, 
And wrestle him to the ground
I'm going to squeeze him dry of the reflections and ruses
He uses to shape shift through the halls of this place,
He and his pack of mirrors
And withstand all the permutations of signs and seals
In the mirrors of my mind
And endure all his impostures there
That may arise even if I have to
Stare into the horror of my own death mask,
Even if I have to look into my own eyes
And see my personally most terrifyingly embarrassing face
I am going to wrestle him down to his last face,
My own
And ask it a question:
"WHY!!!???

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About Me

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Greetings, My name is Jon Landon. I am a native of the San Francisco Bay Area. I I can write everything from Poetry to Technical Writing, I am a UC Berkeley Alumni ('88)