अंकल अल Thirteen

Uncle Al Thirteen: Hotel Blues

Al sits, pen in hand
Dealing out words like the wheels of fate spin
Cocktail napkin notations
Brown paper bags smothered in words
Word spun like silk
Thoughts like thread woven into tales
Born to the fabric of his voice
Never ending pen scratching blues
Two in the morning, fog horns blares out
His journey now fully underway
Got to get the Hotel Blues

The rain beats down in Gene Krupa rhythm
Slapping the window glass with cat like claws
Hotel neon, sleazy and old, beacon for the lost
Lost or terminally hip
Cries out like Sal Mineo stealing a scene
Naked bulb swings from the water marked ceiling
Faded yellow walls peel with the paint
Books litter the shelves like intellectual trash
Their titles resound with a burning flare
Flair for ways of a bygone time
When cool was hip and hip was not cool
Cigarettes lie in smoldering piles
Like small mountains of decay
Got to get the Hotel Blues

They sit around the table of many colors
Colors found within the hardware store's trash
Ringed stains fill it's top from a thousand beer bottles
Each marking the creation of something new
Something said, something thought
Another napkin filled with prose
Uncle Al writes anywhere, anyplace, anytime
His words run from a mind trapped in perpetual thought
The table fills up with ten thousand words
The table leans from the weight of these words
They sit in silence, they sit in grace
They sit in glory
Glory for the nakedness of their words
The raw truth told with honest hands
Blunt reality honed dull by animal thought
Got to get the Hotel Blues

Word his Gasoline, Thoughts his match
Burning the world down one line at a time
Naked words clothed in silken robes of tale
Like the red silk kimono on the yellowed walls
It's pattern tells a story from times long past
Each stitch a word, woven together into tradition
Ancestors history stitched into the here and now
A family's existence within a silk robe
The yellowed wall, the water stained ceiling
The torn black and white linoleum of it's rotting floor
All meet like East meets West
Like the Yin and the Yang
Got to get the Hotel Blues

Pen skids across paper as the ball point rolls
Forming the beginning, middle and end
Building a foundation on which he builds the tale
In the now quiet room on the third floor
The rains beats down, the cold air comes
Blowing in from places unknown
Like a Merchant Marine on a long trip
The rain drives on with its endless song
He pulls his army coat up around his neck
Pulls a fresh paper bag off of the floor
He watches his reflection in the dirty window
Past it, Kearny Street bustles with life
He looks past himself out into the noise
Of noodle joints and dim sum palaces
He sees the furture and past as one
He defies the gods with his sense of life
Got to get the Hotel Blues