Sometimes a hotel room 
is the only receipt you need 

to tell you where you’ve been. 

Each is completely artificial, 
but nearly everything is artificial 

like those silk flowers somehow 
in every Thai restaurant, beaded 

with dew—which is actually 
glue. So maybe a hotel room’s 

really a pastoral. It’s all there 

right on the surface. So, 
pastoral with comforter 

& pillow. Pastoral with telephone 
on the nightstand. Pastoral 

with stranger’s pubic hair 

on the gleaming toilet seat. 
I’m not making this up, 

every day’s a new day 

and I am especially forgetful. 
My lover is calling me 

from Europe on this 
hotel’s anonymous bedside 

line. It’s like a red piece 

of string—the one you see 
in every film when they  

discover the serial killer’s

lair. A map, an image,  
an article from the paper, 

a shrine to the unseen 

connections. Like constellations, 
like stars and if one 

falls it says to all its friends,  

“I’m leaving and you’re coming 
with me!” But we know 

how that ends: a sky filled 

up with so many faces it  
might as well be day. 

I’ve been to parties which 

feel like that—too many lights 
—you have to sit down, 

everyone chattering and wearing 

their halos like crowns. Then 
it’s been 2 or 3 hours and you have 

to leave. It all looks alright from 

from outside, but sometimes it’s better 
not to have gone. To check into 

some anonymous hotel on 47th 

like the Edison with their 
800 rooms. No one really  

stays there. But then it’s to the taxi 

for the next party of the evening where 
this one’s drunk and that one’s laughing & 

there are a few people you know,

but even fewer you like. And you know 
lots of people who would just kill 

to be here among all this glow.