I couldn’t sleep for all the gray light like a fog
ghostly umbilical, as a lost mirage fades
goes down, glows
closer,
and crawls
disrupting the color of dreams;
dim, almost monochrome
a kind of cold gray smoke
burns subliminal sounds
melting in the laminate conscious
of the hotel room,
lost Hollywood outside: a deserted wasteland
of wandering wolves, junked vampires
and blakk metal priests; jungle of decadence
and debauchery,
another country. All polished chrome
and art deco, the Hollywood Hotel stands
above an abandoned graveyard Drive-in Theater
where the bones of old movies haunt
the skeletal mannequins of nowhere
and never
like Babylonian puppets; disjointed creatures.
The fog illuminates the empty horizon
like brushed-steel,
 descending with a humming mist
 almost desperate
 far from perfectly formed
 as it dusts the cracked actor streets
 and heroin sunset
 in some kind of spectral
 electric twilight.

I shiver in the inexplicable soundtrack
of hissing static
comes from the bruised television
and metallic media faces
discussing existential memories
and subconscious rain. The fog
somehow purrs like the female
of the species; a disembodied illusion,
bends shapes in the drowned city
the sublime scars of murdering celebrities
in this murderous metropolis
like dead leaves become the simulacra
of the simulacra,
and I try closing my eyes

the blood of ghosts on the lit end of a cigarette
and the sky like melted nylon
burns black and white as the photographs
of Hell; something iridescent, a worn hurricane
bleeds tombstones and syncopated jazz
scribbled at the corner of the mouth
of Billie Holiday at a café’ on Sunset Boulevard
nineteen-fifty-one; blue smoke and alcohol
bends and twists in the clubs late night fog
like metallic ice and laminate neon
in the holographic smoke from the trumpet player’s
improvised dialogue: ‘no where to go nowhere to run
so you better just walk, baby, or get on your knees
and crawl...’ And the smoke turns
to crude fusion, cold and cruel
like the jet lag drug of overtired hallucination
and the taxi driver laughs and spits out broken poetry
the twisted bones of illusion
beneath his black shades you see the lizard king
dressed in faded leather
and you whisper, "Jim Morrison,"
 in abstract surprise
watching Rodeo Drive twist & turn in
the rearview mirror a storm:
scattering dogs like gods in the ebb & flow
of a fast-forward tornado
and Morrison still laughing,
"everything inside twisted up and broken;
and, baby, no one here gets out alive..."

and everything is inside, outside, upside-down
the reflections in the mirror
turn into broken fragments of the city
drowned and stained in dislocated rain

I open my eyes to a stream of smoke
as the fog crawls colder, somehow closer
in this nameless hour
sticks to my flesh
like the fragments of this metaphysical
Hollywood night, under sun-bright halogens
drowned and fading in the frozen mist
as time itself becomes disjointed
here in this nowhere country
endless and unyielding
convexly curving walls of unfocused reality
in this forest of half-forgotten enigmas
and conundrums
this plush-rusted jungle of Faustian fantasy
where the facades of Disneyland
become subterranean hotels in Hell
and there’s never enough to drink
So I go down to the hotel’s dark & seedy bar
because sleep just ain’t happening...
she asked me what I just said,
even though I never felt my lips move
somehow she didn’t even seem to be there
but I told her anyway, “Sleep just ain’t
happening.” She nodded like she understood
and lit one of those long silk-cut cigarettes
the kind you see prostitutes smoking
on the corners of dirty boulevards. And
the fog was there, inside that bar; seemed to
be swallowing everything
even the music from the old jukebox
came out drowned; submerged
(suffocating).
I looked at my confused reflection in
the mirror behind the bar and saw myself
as a disjointed puppet; no strings. Somewhere
a broke and drunk god was stumbling in a
garbage strewn alleyway, profoundly vomiting
like it was the end of the world-
and not just the end of the night,
or the end of the last drink.

“This is a nowhere country,” I said
to the girl next to me, her mascara bleeding
like she’d been crying all her messed up life.
When she answered there were no words,
no sound; that’s when I noticed she
didn’t even have a shadow... she vanished
in the twisting wave of the gray
and blue smoke she exhaled,
some kind of strange osmosis. Turned into
abstract geometries of ghosts, and fading

and then I was outside looking in through
the fog-stained window, seeing my head
turned down on the wet and scratched bar,
beside dead bottles, used napkins
and cheap plastic black stained ashtrays;
maybe it was some other lost soul
drinking his money away until
the revelation came with black angels
riding a thousand horses from Hell

 Then the fog flooding the streets
of this drowned city,
turned into a silver blanket of
luminous insects
a radiant stream
and a strong metallic smell-
and from somewhere distant,
the moaning of a dying saxophone; I

reach my hands into my coat pockets
with a failing thought, and walk
as the city around me drowns,
and melts, and turns into old smoke
with bent and bruised shadows
as if left-over
from aged & forgotten filmic yesterdays
torn cinemas like misplaced sins,
and I feel as if I am fifteen minutes away
from anything I ever was
and the sun sinks and shatters
into the fragments of fracturing memory
like sinking into mud

and is gone;
the fog now,
 metamorphosed and luminous
as the moon burns through. And I am
fifteen minutes away from my memories
and the Hollywood Hotel disappears
as I walk closer to the bridge
and the river
trails of the fog remain there,
nothing left but fading mist;
looking up, I whisper, “The moon is deceitful.”
Nothing left to wonder.
The river is blue, calming.
On the other side, another country;
perhaps there I may find some sleep?
One step closer to nowhere,
one step further away...

the bridge vibrates, reflects...
neon stained lamplights in the river
wavering like watercolored memories;
the passing cars behind me, remind me
of distorted, bent, improvised saxophones
coughing, and tormented: bending avenues
of time and cities of whiskey illusions...
old bones, old souls; notes like black hours.
And the wind stings my eyes,
the rain beautiful, surreal; hypnotic...
blue smoke falls away from my wet mouth
silently reverberating like dislocated jazz,
softly cinematic
and bleeding

I flick the wet cigarette over the edge,
"...fifteen minutes from anything
I ever was," it falls away
and the burning red
disappears...

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