HOTEL LETTERS
Piles of
magazines and a suitcase
labeled
danger with pamphlets
on death
and transformation.
Bright
plastic bags of candy,
make up and
medicine.
Like
children, I roam
from room to room,
itinerant music playing in the background.
The windows
of the hotel
room are
cracked open
in the distance is the city’s
Mercedes and
fernseher.
I am inside
the parked sedan
outside the
high-rise, waiting.
Nomadic, my
entire life, I have been
packing my
things and leaving.
In the
hotel room in the short black and white film,
I am the
one,
the girl,
the blur,
the pretty blonde
smear in the background.
FRAGMENT
Why do I
have these hands, this face
that changes everything? And where
did I misplace the letter I thought
I sent but then never could locate or replace.
Why when I
read
do the
words become sounds
or blocks of color or music.
In the letter I dreamt
you wrote, you told me everything.
The words
broke open like words
cut from
paper or collaged
onto silver
metal backing,
affixed with blue duct tape,
bright pink and beige matte
paint brushed all along the back.
In the film clip in which I don't speak
but move my
lips, as if whispering.
PHILOSOPHY
In the German film in which
I am disguised as the blonde actress
who portrays the activist turned anarchist,
I am wearing a blonde wig,
disguised as a German film actress.
When I was sixteen I lived
in an abandoned house
with other young anarchists.
We lived inside a small dream
in which we lived
with each other
inside a kind of sweet dream.
But then the boys turned
to heroin and then to ways
of making money to pay for it.
When I asked, they would not say.
But you can see shame and sorrow
when it appears in the face.
I loved them
but by then there was nothing left
of who they had been.
By the time I left
most of them were dead.
I don't know
what to do with this passion.
It wants things I know
I can’t handle. But the opposite
is a passive death I cannot accept.
When in the film, the actress
is finally hunted down and sent to prison,
she lives inside her cell
reading and listening to news
of the world on her transistor radio.
Living a kind of death
I know already
all too well.
