Melancholic Motel

Melancholic Motel

Mark Coleman

 Some mornings you wake up and your heart’s broken. Some mornings it’s not even there. There’s just a dull ache where a beat should be. Other days the sun discovers it on the nightstand where you left it beside a pack of smokes. A few crumpled dollars. A couple of quarters and nickels. Not many pennies.

  You can feel the previous night in your head. Rust fills your mouth and coats your tongue. Your saliva’s brine and motor oil. The spark plug is missing. You probably lost it in a pint glass. Your forehead’s stippled. You think of Bukowski, and remember reciting one of his poems in speech class.

  You wrote a song about her but never sang it. She never heard or even saw it.  The lyrics fell apart. Dissolved in sulfuric forgetfulness where most your valuables go. You might still love her but it’s hard to say if it’s not just mime histrionics. There’s an inscription in every book on the shelf that you wrote yourself.

  Your lusterless eyes just take in the pattern of the motel room carpet most of the time. Little mice squares litter. The yellow that the green pushes up. The lamp on the desk is curious about something. What that might be is anyone’s guess. The desk’s legs taper. Daggering into the floor.

  Your suitcase has exploded. There’s dirty laundry everywhere. The laundry machines hunger for your change. Just as the television hungers for your finger to touch the remote’s clitoral power button. The volume buttons care nothing about their state of disrepair. You hear the other sets and sex in the adjacent rooms. A crying baby somewhere.

  You’re sure there are tears but you can’t feel them. In the matchbox there remains a solitary fire-tipped splinter of wood. You drink the rest of a bottle of beer with a cigarette butt in it. You sigh and go to the bathroom. Sitting there with your head in your hands.

  There seems to be a little death everywhere in the room. It’s not the little death of a pair of lovers. Something seems to be taken away from you with every passing second. You wonder how much the prostitutes go for around here. You wouldn’t even mind if she were venereal. You just want to get away from yourself for a while.

  Time refuses to pass. The hands on the clock always seem to be in the same position. It’s as though their existence is solely for amusement. The pen is out of ink. The perforations on the notepad are dazed. It’s hard to say what’s written on the ones in the wastebasket. It wasn’t inspiration. Whatever it was the termite weeks have eaten it away.

  Your soul is desiccated. You don’t miss the moisture. Sometimes, there’s a drizzle outside. The rain mists. It gently dots the shingles. The flotillas of cloud on some exploratory excursion. The gold against their prows. The cottony mastheads against the tender blue. The gossamer thin hulls. There’s no saying how long their maiden voyage will last.

  There’s rot in your bones. Your tibia’s holding on by a thread. Your teeth have gone un-drilled for too long. There’s a Russian doll echo inside of you. The round burns too slow. Everything lengthens. Then recedes for a bit into the exhausted grey background.
  There is no expectation. This is all there is. A bed you don’t sleep in but just sit on the edge of. There are too many pillows. Not enough sheets. The air conditioner is broken. There’s a torrential sweat on your face. Maybe all those beads are really the tears you can’t feel. You’re still pretty sure that sometimes you cry.