Epoch Of The Hotel Corridor Poem by Rosemary Tonks

I understand you, frightful epoch,
With your jampots, brothls, paranoias,
And your genius for fear, you can't stop shuddering.
Discothèques, I drown among your husky, broken sentences.


I know that to get through to you, my epoch,
I must take a diamond and scratch
On your junkie's green glass skin, my message
And my joy - sober, piercing, twilit.


In the hotel where you live, my Kurdish epoch,
Your opera of typewriters and taperecorders
Boils the hotel with sumptous oompah!
...(...as my heavy-drinking diamond writes)


Boils it! And loosens the bread-grey crusts
Of stucco from the 19th Century..with an opera
Of broken, twilit poetry
Built from your dust-drowned underworld of sighs.


Epoch, we are lonely. For we follow hotel berbers
Of the past, those who drift in corridors, whose tents
An those derisive manuscripts are dipped in marble
By your backward glance.