I am a warped vinyl’s distorted resonance,
a dedicated outlier, forever unapologetic,
agoraphobic, and inarticulate with little interest
in this downtown hotel lobby overcrowded with
fiction-faced drunks, and their slurred semantics.
You will never really know me because I don’t
know how to explain it, as we’re ascending
in the elevator, as your finger’s falling down
my spine. I said nevermind.

The hotel floors are vertebrae in a backbone
composition where your finger is an elevator
and I am a building, of many hallways, rooms,
and floors but nevermind: we will not be this
way forever as we were never before,
temporary like each story’s stoic attention
to the elevator doors and I don’t know why
you’re listening but finally it’s floor forty seven
where two ladders take us to confront
this ****** up empty city. Of the streets
and the deaf buildings they keep,
the in-betweens where I walk: a phantom-face
bleach body forever wandering