Ghost of the Lake Wire Motel

It's as if it never happened.
As if your brains were still there, intact in your skull.

How long has it been?  A year and a half?  Two?
I doubt I'd recognize you now.  You'd be a rotted corpse like any other.

I don't think about you much these days
but sometimes I remember our school-yard conversations about classic rock
or the pranks we pulled on that kid in our gym class in high-school
or that Halloween party in college when you went as the Grim Reaper.
         Or was that him standing behind you?

Shooting your self in the head
alone in a filthy motel room
because of some petty robbery gone bad,
well, it was a pretty dark move for a class clown.

Sometimes I'll see some blond haired, blue eyed Adonis
and I'll expect it to be you
and you'll explain the punchline
but I still wont get it.

I doubt anyone ever will.

So I'll drink one to you, Mike.
Hell, maybe a few.
But you're not around to take my keys when I've had too many.

Ghosts of the Old Haberdashery

Wallpaper like the skin of a leper.
The spiraling staircase creaks and moans and laments so many forgotten yesterdays as I ascend to floors displaced in time.
Under a thick blanket of dust a lizard's skeleton rests atop the arm of a broken chair smiling knowingly into the unknown.
Spider's have built cities between the columns of moldy boxes and splintered shelves.
"Welcome home" they whisper
"Stay with us"
But I climb the weary stairs past cracked windows and bored apparitions to a landing where the gray detritus of time lays scattered around my ox-blood shoes.
An age-stained ivory face peeks at me from a pile of mannequin parts.
It wears the same ironic expression as a traveller I once met from an antique land.
Two more pallid models stand destitute in the corner.
I feel like I've interrupted them, like they're waiting for me to leave.
The path before me is lit only by a singe weak ray of light leaking through a rotted hole in the roof.
The ladder across the room calls through the darkness in raspy tones.
It shivers as if it's reddish rungs were exposed nerves
but I climb it's tortuous length and open the hatch.
Daylight sprays me with a shotgun's mist,
it stings my eyes and confounds my senses.
Looking out over the downtown park the homeless look like stray dogs.
The stray dogs look like rats.
I scrape sediment from the reservoir of an ancient cooling unit,
desperately curious about how the sidewalk must taste.