Motel

I tried to give it soul I asked if you recalled our previous visit calling in briefly for a family celebration I told myself and told myself again be alive here be alive and be here be here in the moment I felt the dim light the emptiness the long stretch of the windowless corridor with key-locked bedrooms to either side I imagined myself in an American movie where solitude and autobiography each play their own chilling part

It is more an isolator for you than the cleansing of the monastery there's less life here than in the five o'clock awakenings for Matins her for whom the bell tolls the bell tolls I hear myself ring those words around my eardrums there could be meditation also I have the diabetes tablets at hand indeed it feels as if I have a full life ahead of me at which point I take a break say to myself in an hour or so I must be leaving time does move on

I read Edward Abbey's words of gopher snakes dancing serenading making love making eye contact I don't match him as a writer or even as a person I moan about a centrally heated hotel with cooked breakfast while he lived in the wilderness crawling on his belly to witness what he later might write about what he saw what he felt he was from the Thoreau tradition a man of doing and a man of detail I I make another coffee and take my free-prescription medicines

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