Ed sat in the tiny green hotel room
with a busted air conditioner,
a taxidermied deer head,
a Gideon’s Bible with all the good parts blacked out,
lamps with grotesque flesh-colored shades,
and a television set that only had three channels,
four if you counted the one that played
a blurry, garbled recording
of an off broadway production
of The King in Yellow
on an endless, repeating loop.
He’d seen it a couple times now;
hard to follow, and bizarrely acted
but there was something
mesmerizing about it.
He couldn’t look away
any time it was on,
which gave him something
to occupy himself with
besides avoiding bad memories
and the stench
of the corpse of his mother
rotting on the daisy print bedsheet
over there in the bathtub.
And he had an awful lot of time on his hands,
ever since checking into Room 32;
sometimes he felt like one of them science monkeys
in a cage, especially with all those eyes on him
peering through the peeling paisley print wallpaper
at him.
