Old Friends

I’m standing outside of the Chelsea Hotel

reading the bronze plaques commemorating some

of the literary luminaries who passed through

this seedy sanctuary on their way to immortality

and left their unique stain in the storied history

of this building which towers over me like a dark fortress.

Dylan Thomas lived and labored here during the

final dark blaze of his booze soaked life before

he yielded to that good night at only thirty nine

and so too did Thomas Wolfe ride out the rest

of his ecstatically quick flash of a life,

only a year between their ages when their

raging flames were so prematurely snuffed out.

Looking up at the rows of dark, dead windows,

I picture the room Leonard Cohen occupied

as Janis Joplin sucked him off on the unmade

bed as the limousines waited in the street,

while across the hall, Edie Sedgwick lies lost

in a leaden heroin dream, having ignored

Cohen’s warning just the previous day

about her unfortunate arrangement of candles,

as a forgotten flame begins its climb up the curtain.

In another room sits Dylan alone in the bottom

of the night writing Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

with hollow, Benzedrine eyes and a Methedrine mouth.

I see Sid Vicious awakening in a trashed room

to find Nancy dead on the bathroom floor bled out

from the single stab wound he dealt her

during a bloody whirlwind of drunken fighting.

I see Patti Smith leaning on the cold balcony railing

outside her room, smiling slyly, dark eyes burning

with secret fire as Robert readies the camera.

Somewhere up there in a dark room of lost time,

Burroughs is still serving his Naked Lunch while

Ginsberg and Corso sit cross-legged on the bed,

speaking soul to soul and contemplating the void.

They’re all still up there in some form, these

luminous ghosts, these beautifully strange guests

roaming around on this sad earth, still passing

through the hallowed halls of the Chelsea Hotel

on their endless journey into eternity.