The manager has a beard again.
His divorce must be final---again.
It's been a while since my last stay at
the El-Car Motel,
Many days since the inkwell consumed me
And removed me from my life aloft,
To that splendid shithole that gets me,
and countless others, off.
He passes over the pen and I sign my
pen name:
Paige Turner.
The joke is always lost on him,
Like the day-old Doritos wrapped up in
his chin.
“Room 11, as always,” he says.
“Rita just finished up.”
Ah, that should give the room a nice
varnish of cum.
Although, I could it use and imagine
myself by the sea.
...In a brine-soaked, hovel of a
brothel by the sea.
Rita waddles down the path with her
twat in knots
And flashes me a corner-bought smile.
Her john quickly departs in his own
knot,
Hunched in shame, stinking of booze and
bile.
But I shouldn't judge.
I'll be hunched in booze myself soon,
Alternating between keyboard and
bottle,
Slashing away at the mottle of room
11's distractions.
There are so many things to take me
from my work,
So many quirks, so much to revolt.
So I give into it, for five minutes.
I stare at every bolt, every stain,
Every sticky puddle I wipe from my
chair,
Every drop from the ceiling, into my
hair.
I give in to my revulsion,
Sometimes to my supper's end,
But once I'm done, once I'm empty,
My true purpose can begin.
The beer doesn't survive the ink, it
bows out
And wine dances into the picture.
Smoke soon follows with deep lakes of
liquor.
I move then,
slow in body,
but in mind,
quicker.
My phone rings and rings.
“Why did I even bring that?” I ask
the phone itself.
Logic outside fiction has already been
shelved,
Along with the Flying Dog, along with
the Andre.
I look at my phone, then push it away.
God how I love him, but I don't need
him now.
I need some more Andre and another word
for “vow”.
This is my one thing: that
destructively wonderful thing we allow ourselves, once in a while.
This is the thing that your smile waits
for, though it may catch your tears.
He is all things to me but this.
This heaven, this incredible hell.
No man excels a flawless moon through
filthy drapes in the El-Car Motel.
I'll see him in the morning,
Soon after I see myself: a stranger at
this point,
But a stranger who can smoke the hell
out of a joint.
When the morning comes with its hammers
And slams Ra against my door,
I pray for an apocalypse.
Then I think of him, of his sweet hands
and sweet lips, and I curse myself.
The night for those thoughts is over.
Gone.
Not to be pondered upon for a very long
time.
Not even if I struggle for prose or for
rhyme,
I will keep it buried, as I have all
these years,
But never forget all I've lived on my
night without fear.
I don't clean the room because the room
can never be cleaned.
Filth breeds like poison ivy in the
El-Car Motel,
Oozing,
But oozing well, into secret happiness.
All that happened during my night will
remain with me.
(You've had a chunk, not the brunt.)
But what comes from it, the stories,
the poetry,
I dispatch.
And while I watch the world devour it,
he will watch me with admiration,
Perhaps wondering, but never asking,
“What is it you do at the El-Car Motel?”
Maybe he doesn't care at all.
Maybe he already knows.
I suppose it doesn't matter,
Because he kisses me, welcomes me home,
envelops me, ravishes me, makes me feel like words do no more good
than Rita's dragon-toothed blowjobs.
(Or so Bernie Hobbs told me in 2008.
Please don't make me elaborate.)
I watch the motel shrink and think
about my sins.
How lovely they were.
How far away and lovely.
Major coolness.
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