The Girl From Cassandra

I’ve been @ The London Motel for three days

In the corner room that looks out over Freeway 99

& I see-saw from window to peephole

To see who is wandering by out on the street.

An Endless Parade of Motherfuckers

In the words of Michael Chabon

Who was writing about Berkeley 

Which isn’t far from here but might as well be

Another planet. I am on the edge

Of something very similar to death.

An in-between place. A limbo.

A nefarious & nebulous room

Above the earth & outside the hemisphere

In a way I am now going to try to describe to you

Even though I know I should just let these things go.

“Do you have any poems that aren’t about Fresno?”

My wife asks me right before reading a draft

Of another poem, not this one, in which I attempt

To talk about something else but halfway through

I’m in the San Joaquin Valley

In the midst of another shitty summer

Putting out cigarettes on my bedroom floor

& climbing in & out the window 

& pushing my desk up against the door 

& sitting amidst a flotsam & jetsam of lighters

& singed hair in the back of my closet

Adrift in a sea of dirty magazines

Convinced someone is looking for me.

My Sister. My Father. My Roommate. 

The Boss of Some Restaurant I’m about to be fired from.

“What do you want!?” My eldest sister says

When I call her on the phone

& launch into a fabricated tragedy

To cover-up the existing one I inhabit.

The shuck & jive of the addict.

The lilt & hustle of the junkie.

The Compartmentalization of Deceit.

The insidious ability to stow away 

The light or the flame or the spark

While speaking into the filthy telephone 

Outside The Avalon Club

Where just last night I was stopped by police 

& they sat me down on the curb

my head resting on the chrome bumper 

Of a 1976 Maroon El Camino

& the headlights of traffic 

Mystic semaphores coming so close

Then disappearing in red sequins.

I used to think I had a choice.

I distinctly remember staring at the flecked door

To Room 27 on the second floor of Rep’s 

On Blackstone & then briskly walking away

Down the staircase past the Urine 

& Empty Packages of Newports & Gum

Wrappers crumpled & forgotten 

After being discarded or inhaled or chewed up

In the maelstrom & whirlwind 

Of Motel Rooms hidden beneath garish neon.

A false exhibit of swim-capped divers,

Six foot sentinels & the moon blinking out 

One tube at a time behind flickering cacti 

& howling silhouettes of pink coyotes.

I sit behind the wheel & shake before going back

I stare into the abyss of silence & black & say: yes.

I stand @ the door & knock & Joni

Lit by the lone lamp appears: luminous & wistful.

She has been on her side of the door so long

She has forgotten that there is a reason,

Perhaps, to human suffering, that we are reaching

For a truth within or without.

But this is the place it begins or ends

& she sees me fresh from the womb 

A soldier w all armour intact 

Standing in the exact location she might have started.

A girl from Aurora or Athens or Cassandra

Facing down a door for the sake of Art

Or Humanity & she enters & makes the claim to the Minotaur

That she will stay only long enough to take note of this room

Above the Freeway looking out 

@ the cars going in one direction or another, 

The Endless Parade of Motherfuckers 

Out there on Earth below the world we now hover in

Because we are none of us alone 

On either side of the real world & the other & the other

We are travelers w many faces 

Seeking or sacrificing one thing through time & space.