(after Rimbaud)

So you check into a one-night hotel, not a particularly comfortable one. The noise is ridiculous. There’s a gang of drowned gamblers in the basement, a pack of juvenile hunters upstairs. Everything is held together by weird threads of music, so much that you feel you’re in some kind of evil documentary.
They give you a bed by the window. Or is it by the door. You can’t quite tell, but anyway, its in the pauper’s ward, and nothing there is clean. Its all so predictable. They have deserts and bombed cities, and they’re proud of them. They try to keep quiet about the ancient revolts simmering on the stairway.
At night you think about oceans and bullets, chemistry, glass.
And the evenings are great, you chat with the tourists, and everyone loves the strange physical groans we can hear in the kitchen. It brings us all together, makes us feel cosy and posh.
You imagine the earth’s lesser strata are on fire. You enjoy the exterminations, the tethered diagnoses, the faint remorse. You know that all planetary orbits have been canceled. You’re expecting a delivery of Bibles and Milk.
All of the hotel guests are satisfied: we sit here with our serious faces, our pineapple booze. We’re not exactly expecting to become legendary.

London 1873 / 2009