Hotel Proteus

 “This must all be imagined.

 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, 1^st 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, 2^nd 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, 2^nd 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, 3^rd 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!!!???