Cockroach Hotel

Left my sleep in hotel room
Inscribed on headboard
With a plastic spoon:
‘Dreams For Rent.’

Dawn sun sluiced,
Slithered as snakes
Seeking solace in pavement crack.

Among street detritus and wrack
The sudden gleam of nacre, inspired
Soft shoe scuttlers to sauté
Into imaginations of the day.
Immaculate the beauty.
 
Lonely bottles of downtown drunks,
Hung over rails of
Chemical-washed breath:
Lingered as morntide droplets.
Tasted the teeth of my wallowed thirst,
Dreggy dredges of the heart
Wrapped in bicycle chains
Stone barrelled, lined canal spine.

A rat scurried beneath shadows, from
Closing shutters of all-night café -
Pitch black eyes reflected gnawed ribs
Of nineteenth century terraces.

Library of everyday living blooms -
Pigeons, plastic bottles, shoppers…….
Bone close to the shelves of the town
Marrow of all to come, to become.

Hotel smeared by breakfast smell
Dead pig fragrance tilts the tables
A young couple clash over knives
Forks prick their tongues:
These are best years of your lives?

Who smoked that cigarette
Corpsed in chipped ash tray?
Nest of threads / threading carpet
Trail for midnight cockroach
Home to a footprint cemetery,
Where strangers have quietly trod.

Panic to find in wall of sound
Misplaced harmonies, of
Seventy two nights
Two hundred songs
In Room 201.

Heavy horse, cart, toiling farmer
Wedged the painting in
My suitcase, keep sake,
Dust shrouded frame.
Dead skin is
Nothing but dust…..