still life with desk, lamp, and blackout curtain

4:30 a.m. in another hotel room
me, up and writing at the green marblette desk.

there's something about the familiarity
of these strange places that makes me philosophical
when i'd rather be asleep.

every hotel room is a single cell
dividing and redividing to cover the land.
we have let our lives fall into predictable patterns;
we are each of us guilty of the easy love of habit.

we fear the unknown
seek to avoid struggle
want to stay home, at least
take home with us when we go.

we drive to new cities but see nothing new:
the same beef and cheese restaurants;
this sterile gas station;
that strip mall cut from the unending cloth of suburbia;

and this room, with this table,
this lamp, this framed print
of an urn full of flowers that maybe lived once
but were captured in a pastel drawing,
died, and were discarded
leaving behind a stain on a wall
in a thousand identical hotel rooms.
multiplied to infinity, a mirror on a mirror
on the elevator wall.

we sleepless victims of the worst kind of art
can only turn our tired eyes towards the window
and hope for a sunrise unlike any other.

the clouds, at least,
still come and go as they please.