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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf02V8AtMag

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By all accounts 

It ought to've been sad;

It ought to have carried 

A kind of hollow emptiness -

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A kind of vacuum, 

A kind of void - 

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A vacant space 

With an almost gravitational pull - 

A longing, a wanting - 

And that cold, hushed surrender

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That comes with the realization

That there's nothing left

That you haven't already tried

With the shape 

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For it

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To fill.

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I was in a hotel-room in downtown Vancouver, 

Comped 

By the insurance company,

Small, but nice enough to feel that sense of grandiosity 

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That coincides with being far away from home.

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I hadn't been sleeping - cliché as it might sound - 

And I had one of those screen-written moments 

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Where 

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The AC wasn't quite strong enough,

The alarm-clock was blinking

With its eerie, automated rhythm 

And the sheets 

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Kept making that coarse, artificial sound 

That comes from too small a thread count 

And too recently having been shelled

From their Chinese, industrial packaging.

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It smelled like a hotel room - 

Like every Best-Western I'd ever slept in - 

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And every-time I'd roll over

I'd find the wandering of my thoughts

Trace a dotted line

Between the place that I was laying

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And towards an opening in the window.

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Alone in a big-city hotel room,

No better place to think -

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Where the streets smell like 

Vietnamese noodles, neon, 

And a kind of cumulative, 

Layered sense 

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Of nearly 150 years of grime.

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They don't let you open hotel-room windows anymore;

They just crack, a little, buckle

When its elbow hits the lock, and then it just sits there,

Frustratingly, as you wonder why a half open window 

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Would be worth being a window, at all. 

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So I lit a cigarette, stuck my arm out to the pit

And did my best 

To keep from letting the warm-air 

In the room 

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Pull in 

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As I'd flick my thumb against the cigarette butt, 

Relax my shoulders, and quietly try to exhale.

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And I don't know, 

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It should have felt depressing,

Half as satisfying 

As an open-window

Might've been - 

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Futile, maybe, 

Stifling - 

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But every now and then

I'd catch a draft 

As it rolled past the gap -

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Warm wind, 

Fragrant,

Like spring - 

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And I'd pull on my crooked cigarette,

Standing in my boxers, casually leaning 

Like I was James f*****g Dean

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And that all that posture

Was somehow deliberate

Instead of inconveniently happening.

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And I'd smell that city, the artificial room, 

  And that distant, faded sense 

Of green. 

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And all that came to me 

In that moment

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Was the feeling of being alone in the world,

That the window was redundant, 

The cigarette between my fingertips 

And a quiet sense of comfort.

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Just a cigarette

And an arbitrary moment

But nearly five years have past

And I still, for whatever reason, 

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    remember it.

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