CARTOGRAPHY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

A NOCTURNE AFTER READING NORMAN
MAILER, JIM MORRISON, AND GREGORY CORSO

Dark rain falls through the American Night
like the wounded angels of sad lost dreams.
We hear the wheels hiss songs of lonely Aprils
long past memory, tasting of kisses shared in the
void filled with shadows of desolation.

October has drawn down into me, leeching the
marrow of stolen years leaving grey traces across
the muted colors of bleeding eyes, sightless in the
visions of experience, the politics of time
stalking the tragedian stage with a cynics laugh.

I have worshipped in the cathedral of the American Night,
communion taken with a brandy chaser,
confession wrung out of a rain soaked overcoat
like tears of celebration at the funeral
of a hero lost, with only the drunken coward
remaing to give the eulogy.

The wheels of the day are turning round,
as the skyline is etched in lightning’s gravure
inscripture to an elemental god hanging in the wind that blows so hard
the teeth rattle in your skull,
smile becomes a death masque as
your face fades, and
you fall endlessly into the American Night.

THE LAST HOTEL.....

There is this hotel, way down on the empty streets,
waiting in a whisper of broken, tortured neon,
it is the place where the lonely dreams
of the artist, the singer, the poet,
go to meet the ending of their sadness,
as their lives collide with deaths black
wings enfolding all in restless peace.
It is the Chelsea Hotel, the Hotel California,
it is Gehenna, Perdition, and even Betrayal.
Marquees falling down across the filth, the
grime, of bricks misshapen as clouds of thunder.

There is a room that they are holding,
somewhere on the fourth or fifth floor,
for my arrival, soon to approach that
door, that portal to the shrouded temple,
where the final service will be read, as
my breath fades, pain departs, and
the rusted key closes the scarred lock,
to lower me into that land unknown,
where there is no sorrow, love, or hate,
only the silent bellboy, the mute desk clerk,
the elevator that screams without a sound.

It is the last hotel on the final street,
in a City now consumed in pale mist.
There is no taxi that can find the place,
no tour guide to list its dubious cuisine,
but still it can be found, out in the night,
your heart will direct, your soul shall guide,
for this is the last room that you shall occupy,
for here is where the poets come to die.

Soon I shall journey there, take a drink,
my last, then move through the lobby,
pass into the endless dark, beyond the
doors of this, the last hotel, on the last
street, in the vast City within me, now
consumed by the close of my time.