Heartbreak Hotel
Unnecessary intro to a poem #287: This poem is about that thing where you realize you’re better off alone than running after chimeras and nightmares in search of love, and so you resolve to really settle into your hopelessness this time, only to realize: It ain’t so bad! There are even some enviable perks. But then, in one of those pale, hollow in-between spaces, some sad, hollowed out moment between the party lights and your cold pillow, you realize: No, it’s every bit as bad as I feared.
Heartbreak Hotel
i
After a particularly bewildering affair with
a woman who, despite the fact that you were
never particularly smitten by her, somehow still drove you well out
beyond the fringes of sanity,
you stuffed some maimed sheet music
and what was left of your Mustang into
a suitcase, and moved into
a busted down place
known to local denizens
as the Heartbreak Hotel.
It’s on an out-of-the-way strip, and haunted by
the incessant flickering of every bulb,
chandelier, and streetlamp on the block,
a parade of electricians having failed
to fix the issue.
You’re happy here. Everyone’s friendly—
they sit laughing and telling stories, and
some of them aren’t bad looking,
even in those lights.
Old Tom raps at the bar with his porkpie yanked
down over his nose, his voice a deranged blues vinyl.
The barman dresses like Sinatra, and any mention
of tomorrow provokes him to leap up screaming,
and drive the offending party out into the night at the point of a Browning shotgun.
Then Tom lurches to the chipped upright, and
as the moon rises, his fingers seething like
devil’s claws, he pounds out a pulsing and
demented jazz tune. On cue, all the Deans
and Norma Jeans descend from their suites
as in a pageant, and the dancing begins—
a mad, reeling, staggering cakewalk—
a tribute to their long-gone, failed,
and foolish
gamble.
ii
Outside, a debauched actor has been shot by a lover
beneath the colonnade palms. There will be no
investigation— not here. The blood only dyes his
leather jacket blacker, and he sits coolly, smoking
American Spirits Blue on the curb with the valets.
He gazes up at the sky, not disconsolate.
“Y’know, amigos, I never even smoked. Never
woulda started if not for that fuckin’ rock ‘n roller
up in room 96, but she didn’t want to
smoke alone and goddammit she’s a star.”
Those are his last words. He goes out
smiling in the strobe, a general
who fought to the last man.
She’s a beauty, it’s true. Impossible lavender sequins
burst from her face, and she hunches over her
cardioid mic like a desert weed,
wavering in time to denim and wine.
Long ago she tossed a Draped Bust silver dollar into
some subway busker’s case— too hurt too young
to know better.
iii
At daybreak, things get a little dicey.
They start piping “Tiny Dancer”
or “Don’t Stop Believing” in through
the central air like Zyklon B. Revelers
scatter. Blood hardens at the
bottoms of wine glasses.
Tom is already sawing away on a
settee in the grand lobby— but you
were still hoping for more,
you big, dumb kid.
You shuffle up to your room,
and as you cross the threshold,
artillery blasts rip through
the cheap drywall,
and the hotel shatters to rubble.
If only I could go back, and just try again.
But that won’t do.
Your single bed totters in the wreckage,
wedged between the blown-up piano
and a chunk of the ceiling.
If only I could just —
The pillow winks, “Come
closer, don’t be shy.”
So, you bite your lip bloody,
pick through the debris,
and get down
under those starchy sheets —
If only —
sheets pockmarked by a thousand
cigarette cherries,
wine stains,
sex stains—
And you’re alright,
you’re in bed now—
how bad could it be?