A Dark Apartment
this room that we’ve sat in, on the floor as it pulls itself between the frames of the parted door
is our space of all movement and growth as our hands skirt the coarse surfaces like a chime rising from dark plain depths to roadside florescence
the green night is cloud laden on sidewalk arcades of windows with parted curtains windows with pulled tight overlapped curtains windows with slung open curtains as green seeps across the sparse floor where we lay
the moulding of wall where we lean and the tile lattice we pull ourselves across the stillness when we make it still falls on pressed wood low cabinets like breath dust
we’ve sat in this room and skirted fixed croppings of stability peered into corner’s grates for days on end and lay on piers rising and softly tossing in the side lamp light.
I heard you sitting in the doorway and around spindlelike legs rising high above shagpressed scruff I saw you sit in grey light between blinds scoring shadow on your skin from blinds hanging like masks in window ports to move stable rooms.
I see you in this room with me, slumped oblong at wall groin and me stretched from the low lying green to the dark spot where we have felt pavement where my hand reaches to.
At the second level windows hanging in the volume of the vaporous stars casting yellow through matted screens against many painted tenant walls. And walls reflections hold the night as captive to be read as stains when the silver sun soon rises.
Los Angeles has the cruelest morning, slipping through the empty predawn streets in the tightest time of year, stripping the coats now cats beds to nestle. I’m away so much of the time. Hermetic spring by now oscillating fans are spring breezes and the refreshing showers of Atlanta are hot afternoon bathing stepping across cat litter scattered on the bathroom floor. And my bed gets hot when I lie there ’til 2pm. When I’ve been sleeping on the futon for days and not waking up.
low wall corners grey striated smudges where cats have struck their sides so many times
This room is too big everything feels groundless and distant like a poorly stocked thriftstore. The table and lamp next to one another look useless, there are cords stretched across the floor rising up to outlets, tan on a semigloss white wall. The room is Green River to me, too big each piece of furniture each trinket in the gift shop each home in the town is afforded with too much space, and no acknowledgement that that place is where it actually belongs. But for some reason there is a sense of striving to find a place within this vastness, each room in this motel has summoned a balance, a catalogue of elements, that seems so programmed to perfection, that deficiencies can be found listed on post-it notes outside rooms. Yet it still feels empty. The air in the rooms and hallways smells the same as it does outside, warm, dry, and unbreathed. And this room, with its stretch of mauve carpet, its pockets of furniture legs meeting the floor and its white walls and ceilings, seems so big, as to swallow up the town, as to leave me as a spectator who is just passing through its endless migration.
