Hotel Fire

by Montgomery Maxton

you stand by the barely-able-to-open suicide-proof 40th floor window smoking a canadian cigarette, looking out and down onto the greatest living city in the saddest dying fucked-up world: this could be my home; our home you say with an exhale of smoke as your blackberry screams in the other room - i laugh as i roll onto my back and remind you that international businessmen don’t have homes and bi-polar rent-boys reside and live by the hour. i lay in the king-sized bed; you say i’m your prince; i say this is a scandal that only a royal prince could pull-off flawlessly (like the beauty of a mercedes to conceal an ugly conspiracy) while my head lays on the pillow that is hand-stitched with the words ‘sweet dreams.’ i’m coming down off of everything; off of you; off of the four hours that precede dawn; i’m fucked-out - the five hundred thread count white sheet is pulled below my muscled-V pelvis, revealing my erection and you go from one last puff on your fag to puffing on this fag. you know i’m going to japan for awhile, we won’t get to talk much; i won’t be able to tell you i miss you, need you, want you back inside me and i say life is a flammable gamble, this hotel room is on fire and cost a grand a night for sure and you’re here for the hell-of-it five nights in row with just a magnetic strip and foreign identification. i’ll kiss you goodbye at the taxi stand on a sunday morning that even andy warhol couldn’t even find a way to capture and reproduce because some things just cannot be captured and reproduced for the sake of art or life, same difference, same disappointment – and the whole time you’re gone these lyric will loop in my head: (they made a statue of us and put it on a mountaintop / the tourist come and stare at us / they’ll name a city after us and later say it’s all our fault / they made a statue of us / our nose have begun to rust). i’ll wait for you to come back with tales of your world travels and small seeds that you instruct me to put in a pot of boiling water watch to see what happens; seeds pulled from a box written in another language so i have nothing to expect except everything i can imagine.

6S

Montgomery Maxton, author of Putting the Sin in Wisconsin, lives in Manhattan and orders Chinese take-out from Ho Lee at 3750 Broadway (Store 1) New York, NY 10032. The lyrics he used in this piece are from Regina Spektor’s song “Us.” He is also a photographer with exhibits forthcoming in New York City, Cincinnati, Columbus and San Francisco. He eats Uni-Cornflakes for breakfast in the mid-afternoon before he gets on the subway and watches homeless men pee between cars.