secret motel

I drink beer with the janitors beside the dumpster in grey afternoon drizzle. They go back to work. I continue drinking beer and absorbing the drizzle. I pit my emptiness against the parking lot's emptiness. My notebook smells like rain on trees. Or maybe it's just the trees at the edge of the parking lot. Echoes of their scent. I know my handwriting will never recover. Drink beer and sleep in drizzle. And dream of tree echoes. I don't know anyone out here. I could knock on doors for the next 100 years and never meet a familiar face. Drink beer in drizzle and collapse on stranger's lawn. They don't call the Police on you out here. They correctly assume the garbage men will haul you away. Haul you away into isolation fields of drizzle, empty bottles, and the tree echoes from a hundred fields away. A hundred afternoons from downtown and spacious parking. My lungs aren't quite full. Rescue vinyl records from the rain and fill secret motel with sound and then echoes. The mirror is full of echoes. I flush the toilet and whirl a message to trees guarding a stranger's lawn, an empty parking lot. And the dumpsters and loading docks of California are awful lonely when the janitors don't come around.