Flophouse

I know of rooms where men can never dream.

Shuffling through mildewed corridors, stoned,

I let craving embalm me like a coroner.

And nothing surfaced in the ether of my sleep:

I rose without an image of my own.

But my bloodshot eyes made in darkness

seven ghosts: first was you—an emanation

of the lighter’s glow—a breath of condensation,

nothing I could hold. Your lips glowed

with the yellow of late bruise. I was the second

ghost, transfixed by the drone of wasps at nest

beneath this roof. The third, the fourth

are residues I scraped from bubble pipes,

confused how smoke’s soft rope could tether you,

your throat to paradise. You scorched the glass

with the blue flame of a torch, inhaled, inhaled,

inhaled. Fifth was a syringe: its milliliter lines,

like ladder rungs descending to the cellar

of your elbow, disappeared. Persistent as the gears

that spin a clock’s second hand, sixth

was just a hacking cough alive inside each scrap

of aluminum foil, burnt black and buried in the trash.

Last was a mirror, something smooth enough to show

a rawboned jaw, the purple glimmer of veins

collapsed just below your knuckles.

You knelt. You asked yourself a question:

was it you or your reflection

further now from heaven?