Upon opening the door, a pressure change & Erie wind bears you aloft into the vestibule. Craggy bluff of dishware in the sink. Tremulous table. Badly stained buffet with an uncloseably askew glass door. Vernal pool of desiccated coffee on the laminate counter. A plastic bag of refuse that squats, hobbled, in the heart of the kitchen for days. The commode faces the vanity, situated inches away, so that you are compelled to look yourself in the eyes in the mirror should you sit upon it. My fellow traveler exits his lair only with ingestive or excretive intent. Fuck yeah exhortations for his Discord, firing up the ganja with an accomplice crossing midnight. A festival spirit predominates in the rooms below. Riding those tremors in the sodium-vapor shadows, four a.m. thoughts: order has yielded for turbulence, we are in retreat to our caves, we are conveyed by underground streams. Waking nights & soporific days. Wind buffets the window. Ink-washed exoplanet parchment map ceiling stains. The house settles to my fellow traveler’s profound respiration through the wall. The Tabard Inn on Talbot Yard received, in equal measure, the unsavory, the disheveled, the malefactor, the unsullied, the traveler, the pilgrim. They rose at dawn, drank to sleep at dusk, & slept partitioned by walls of wattle-&-daub. I lie here at five a.m., carried by circumstance, borne upon

a racking mattress
as upon a bark, open-aired
on the bitter seas

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Image: “Bathroom Wall of Half Moon, Hudson, NY”