Faces Come Out of the Rain

There is a face in the mirror which is not mine. Not the face or the mirror. An old hotel and multiple bottles of cheap wine. In the restaurant bathroom washing my hands. I have seen a ghost who wears my features. She holds my jaw with hers, gazes into me sadly before she goes.

She was only passing through, on her way to her own funeral, she stopped for a drink. She was beautiful because she was empty, she could walk through walls.

A woman lying naked on a crumpled bed, legs spread, eyes dead. Sharp white sheets and blood stains on the ceiling. In the faint light she floats inside the ocean of her own saturated mind. There is a fantasy carnival life she leads down in the city. Walking beneath the yellow street lamps, carrying her young tight body beneath a long thin coat.

Red is the light. Fire’s alive and it burns all night.

A man at the old hotel bar, mahogany and the smell of wet dish rags. You can still smoke in this place, it still smells like cigarettes and the bile of loneliness. Dust in the withered carpeting which runs wall to crooked wall along the slanted floor. No windows and no doors.

There are creaks beneath her stockinged feet.

“Would you take a walk with me,” she says, “I don’t want to die here, in this run down place. Take my wrists, dangle me over the black water.”

She. doesn’t know why she needs a man to hold her away from herself. Tiny creature with wide silk eyes, flies through the window into the dark blank night.

She. glides through walls.

She. shakes and rattles her smooth skeleton bones. She. dances slowly for a bad man in a small pink room. Her fine pale body is a shadow in the cage of the door frame. He smiles as he watches the little doves on her hips swivel and twist.

Nothing is holy in this place. Red wine in plastic cups and smoke stains in the rugs.

Little girl, little one. On your knees, now, there’s a good little one. We’ll be alright in the end, my sweet. We will be, sooner or later, in the end.

. . . . .

Visions after sucking down over 300 pages of Jim Morrison poetry. Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of his death at the age of 27 in Paris. We were both born on December 8th. He once said if he could do it all over again he would have just been a poet tending to his own garden in solitude.