Sleep Hotel
Soothing rays from potlights
bathe the room in calming dimness
Pillows, plump and nestled together
like a mother’s round, milkfull breasts,
The sound of rain falling,
hissing gently from a machine
Or
gurgling brook
night sounds
A simulated caressing woosh
The bed that rocks gently, swaying in rhythm
To an electronic, generated heartbeat
Built into the firm, yet supple, heated mattress
Bottles of melatonin, and artfully faded, faux antique
Green tins of chamomile tea
Line the walls’ shelves
Each one takes a room, weary and red eyed, scathed and raw
Hope almost gone
Eaten away by rattlesnake minds and gnawing insectoid thoughts
Regrets that slither until they strike,
and pierce anew already wounded flesh
She is young but looks old, heavy and slightly neutered
He is large, hulking pretty and hollow eyed
There are others, but first we’ll focus on these two.
Their days are led by long hikes on an impossibly pristine
Riverside,
Covered in ashen mist
Symmetrically arrayed
Long stalks of golden marsh weed
Look like they’d been planted there by Home Stagers
Selling outdoor Real Estate.
Everything matches, the golden grass and golden sun,
The hush of the wind across the rippling stalks
They walk to exhaustion.
Young though she is, she thinks she might stop
And just catch her breath
When she thinks she can’t go on
They all rest on a large, gray rock
Whose naturally sculpted surfaces create a seat, sort of, for all
Later on they sit in a circle after eating calming foods, rice and vegetables and if you want, fresh baked, buttered bread
She presents strong. She is strong. Young, old for her age.
But the walk and the food, the time spent in the natural spring that doubles as a pool
Have led her to some strange abandonment
She sits there and in front of strangers, cries.
Stripped of her precocity and blase righteousness
In the morning she cries too,
Emerging
from that strange womb
Of Millennial Omnipotence
Birthing painfully, slowly
from the cloying conviction that everybody’s nuts but her
She can’t sleep
because
she has been pretending that there is no
Bottom at which she dwells
But
her last lower-than-her friend
has abandoned her,
called her out
For her fragile arrogance
And the night awake endures.
Sleep so almost within reach, so tauntingly close
A kind of torture forces her hand, squeezes the long contained
Hurts from her heart
She surrenders as angels offering unconsciousness hover above
Promising a respite if only she spills the truth.
So she does, the gasping abrasive sobs raking her throat
The room, the closest she has ever gotten to unconditional maternal
Love enfolds her
She curls up on the moundlike pillows, imagining for the first time,
Her mother’s gaze.
His arms ache from covering the fact
that he really is not in charge of his household
He hunches his shoulders and they throb
As his desires careen onto a hard rock of reality
He is the pretty boy husband to a successful woman
He protects her from the knowledge that all of her efforts
To give him his dreams only wound him more
He is stuck in a nowhere town
doing nowhere things thinking nowhere
Thoughts
In his room he throws off the pillows, making the mattress
As spare and empty as a soldier’s cot
Longs for the cold harsh discipline of an all men’s s world
Imagining the twilight of the room
To be a wartorn earth
Covered in a nuclear haze completely made by men.
At last he can sleep
The Sleep Hotel whispers the dreams of its inhabitants
Between the walls
Twenty hushed subconsciouses dreaming not in tandem
Nor in sync, but a woven rhythm in and out
In and out, a particle wave of images, stories thought
Spilling the beans of each human lie, I mean life
A pulse of symbols and poetry played to the hum
Of restful snores
That is the dew glistening web, the sparking net of sleep stories
The Hotel’s pretenses are merely objects that aid
Unconsciousness
Full well knowing if a hotel can know
That truth is the real commodity
A place to tell
The Truth, dreamed or thought,
Spoken or sobbed,
Truth.
Soothing rays from potlights
bathe the room in calming dimness
Pillows, plump and nestled together
like a mother’s round, milkfull breasts,
The sound of rain falling,
hissing gently from a machine
Or
gurgling brook
night sounds
A simulated caressing woosh
The bed that rocks gently, swaying in rhythm
To an electronic, generated heartbeat
Built into the firm, yet supple, heated mattress
Bottles of melatonin, and artfully faded, faux antique
Green tins of chamomile tea
Line the walls’ shelves
Each one takes a room, weary and red eyed, scathed and raw
Hope almost gone
Eaten away by rattlesnake minds and gnawing insectoid thoughts
Regrets that slither until they strike,
and pierce anew already wounded flesh
She is young but looks old, heavy and slightly neutered
He is large, hulking pretty and hollow eyed
There are others, but first we’ll focus on these two.
Their days are led by long hikes on an impossibly pristine
Riverside,
Covered in ashen mist
Symmetrically arrayed
Long stalks of golden marsh weed
Look like they’d been planted there by Home Stagers
Selling outdoor Real Estate.
Everything matches, the golden grass and golden sun,
The hush of the wind across the rippling stalks
They walk to exhaustion.
Young though she is, she thinks she might stop
And just catch her breath
When she thinks she can’t go on
They all rest on a large, gray rock
Whose naturally sculpted surfaces create a seat, sort of, for all
Later on they sit in a circle after eating calming foods, rice and vegetables and if you want, fresh baked, buttered bread
She presents strong. She is strong. Young, old for her age.
But the walk and the food, the time spent in the natural spring that doubles as a pool
Have led her to some strange abandonment
She sits there and in front of strangers, cries.
Stripped of her precocity and blase righteousness
In the morning she cries too,
Emerging
from that strange womb
Of Millennial Omnipotence
Birthing painfully, slowly
from the cloying conviction that everybody’s nuts but her
She can’t sleep
because
she has been pretending that there is no
Bottom at which she dwells
But
her last lower-than-her friend
has abandoned her,
called her out
For her fragile arrogance
And the night awake endures.
Sleep so almost within reach, so tauntingly close
A kind of torture forces her hand, squeezes the long contained
Hurts from her heart
She surrenders as angels offering unconsciousness hover above
Promising a respite if only she spills the truth.
So she does, the gasping abrasive sobs raking her throat
The room, the closest she has ever gotten to unconditional maternal
Love enfolds her
She curls up on the moundlike pillows, imagining for the first time,
Her mother’s gaze.
His arms ache from covering the fact
that he really is not in charge of his household
He hunches his shoulders and they throb
As his desires careen onto a hard rock of reality
He is the pretty boy husband to a successful woman
He protects her from the knowledge that all of her efforts
To give him his dreams only wound him more
He is stuck in a nowhere town
doing nowhere things thinking nowhere
Thoughts
In his room he throws off the pillows, making the mattress
As spare and empty as a soldier’s cot
Longs for the cold harsh discipline of an all men’s s world
Imagining the twilight of the room
To be a wartorn earth
Covered in a nuclear haze completely made by men.
At last he can sleep
The Sleep Hotel whispers the dreams of its inhabitants
Between the walls
Twenty hushed subconsciouses dreaming not in tandem
Nor in sync, but a woven rhythm in and out
In and out, a particle wave of images, stories thought
Spilling the beans of each human lie, I mean life
A pulse of symbols and poetry played to the hum
Of restful snores
That is the dew glistening web, the sparking net of sleep stories
The Hotel’s pretenses are merely objects that aid
Unconsciousness
Full well knowing if a hotel can know
That truth is the real commodity
A place to tell
The Truth, dreamed or thought,
Spoken or sobbed,
Truth.
