Words Spoken to a Muse in a Hotel Room in Syracuse New York

 

So no one can accuse me

Of not laying it out on the line

Most of the time

From the very title of it

Leaving little room for doubt

About with whom I'm speaking
Or where I've been

That’s what you call

The network effect

Of modern life

Filling in the story
The way the eye likes

To complete the arc 

Of the rainbow's glory

From only a hint of color

We laughed and drank and talked
And then like a couple 
Of old ghosts draped in muslin

We danced in the moonlight

At the end of the hall

While Marissa took a short nap

*  *  *  *  *

 

--> Marissa crashed out on the bed not long after we checked into the hotel – it had been a long day’s drive, and she’d spent more than 3 hours behind the wheel.   The traffic droned by on the Interstate that ran parallel to the parking lot just outside the motel window.  I sat and after a while fell into a meditative trance.  Then I went downstairs to change the air freshener in the car.  A puff or two later I was all set and went back upstairs.  The drapes at the end of the hallway billowed in the breeze.  Or was it something else, a dust devil perhaps or the exhalation from a nearby air vent?  

Because life is inherently interesting – that’s what I told myself – that’s reason enough to keep writing, even if it only means that I continue scribbling things down in one my little notebooks.  With a memory so porous as mine, there is simply no other way to keep track of all the amazing things that happen in the course of an otherwise quite ordinary day.

Poetry entails a sort of scientific inquiry into the nature of the universe – its spiritual dimensions.  I closed my eyes and rested my forehead on the edge of the desktop.  I listened intently to the hard drive whirring hoping I could better discern and transcribe everything it said.