Making love in the sun, in the morning sun
in a hotel room
above the alley
where poor men poke for bottles;
making love in the sun
making love by a carpet redder than our blood,
making love while the boys sell headlines
and Cadillacs,
making love by a photograph of Paris
and an open pack of Chesterfields,
making love while other men- poor folks-
work.
That moment- to this. . .
may be years in the way they measure,
but it's only one sentence back in my mind-
there are so many days
when living stops and pulls up and sits
and waits like a train on the rails.
I pass the hotel at 8
and at 5; there are cats in the alleys
and bottles and bums,
and I look up at the window and think,
I no longer know where you are,
and I walk on and wonder where
the living goes
when it stops.

One day this building will become old and shabby
with peeling wallpaper, ratty carpeting, and cracking plaster.
One day the only option besides the wrecking ball will be
to sit and wait to die.
To crumble and decay,
to rust and fall to pieces.
Termites will find homes in the banisters,
moths will eat at the books left behin
by the pillaging teenagers that steal the furniture.
Chesterfields and repaired ottomans
will show up in the neighbourhood,
refurbished and reupholstered, saved for mother’s day.
No one was going to use them otherwise.
Better they don’t go to waste.
The old piano with the cracked keys
will slouch alone in the empty sitting room,
savouring what little memories weren’t scraped from this carcass
like the last of the peanut butter from it’s jar.
One day this building will disappear,
making a grave of it’s foundations.

Yellow is ***** or is it? I know a lot of yellow people that think like dishwashers
spinning turning loose their causes for finding likeness compatible. I know people that like to machinify the living and talk about furniture as if it heard the rumors in the fabric already supposedly threading. I know people that lust after red draping rooms thinking it more desperate than the sun I’ve seen them click at it looking directly into the lighting of things making drama more dramatic than modern living. I’ve heard people make relationships out of these resemblances as if every eye had an ear to be heard without looking making silence appear chilling but every bit thrilling. Was it just yesterday a girl confessed she named her plants with each passing lover? There are people that attach themselves to objects so violently they fall in love with a chair a chair worth a thousand words more than it gives in its cedar vintage dress but that’s just one chair. I know people that vacation to inns retreat to estate sales to hoard stories in bracelets and oil lamps tracking floorboards with time uttering words no longer used like duvets and chesterfields and smirking into their dusty reflection from an embroidered hand mirror. I know people that would buy used postcards. Yellow. All I’m saying is I know people that avoid white at all cost.

A Lazarus body litters the sidewalk
outside a well-lit, desolate lobby.

On the left is a mexican restaurant,
with a line reaching to the
entrance. They should stamp
the grey and scratched up
plexiglass with a light and
dark purple neon:
Welcome To America.
It would be reinforced
by every delicious crunch
one hears on the way out as
cheap crumbs garnish concrete.

On the right, there’s a bar
alive on a Friday night.
Friends share hearty laughs
and pats on the back.
The bitter and the perishing
pretend they want this
when they should be
somewhere or someone else.
And mingling singles look for
compliments and numbers,
or maybe just someone to
take back and **** the **** out of.

But in the midst sits
a throne for ghosts.
Ceiling fluorescent reflects
off porcelain, paler than a farmer tan.
There are no other colors besides
the receptionist, bored to death,
leaning on the wall behind
the porcelain reception desk,
reading a copy of Ebony.
No ottomans or chesterfields
or benches. No consoles or cocktail
tables. Nothing adorning the walls.
Not even a stain.
Just a white hole, a bright
***** in an otherwise colorful
street on gray canvas.

I rise from my slumber
and mosey on out the lobby
in my purple linen suit.
The impoverished scrag,
his dog lapping his sores, asks
if I’d spare some change.

“Sorry, I only have card tonight.”

“That’s alright, sir. God bless.”

And I walk on, aware of the
Abrahams rubbing up against
a ****** in my wallet. I take a sip
of whiskey hidden in my empty
can of a drink that can never
satiate me. I wait for traffic to pass,
and then I jaywalk across Sticks St.


-
by Aleksander Mielnikow