Cosmic Hotels

The shy, reclusive and self taught maker of shadow boxes and experimental films, Joseph Cornell , rarely left New York State, with the exception of a few college years in Andover, Mass, spending most of his life in a modest house in the beautifully named Utopia Parkway, Queens, caring for his mother and disabled brother. His artwork is filled with a yearning for the unobtainable ; birds with their freedom of flight, glamorous movie stars and ballerinas as the source of passionate, platonic romances and especially travel to the most luxurious and wondrous locations.

Hotels are a common feature of his shadow boxes, miniature visions of rest stops and trysting places for artistic, mythological and astrological archetypes as they travel through the starry Empyrean and the wastes of infinity.

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Night Games

Ellen Rogers

Maybe it’s the answer but sleep
I feel is out of the question
As your skin crackles with electricity
Surging through the nerve endings
Generating a force field that shocks
When our skin and flesh intersect
I know you want to play once again
Those night games in earnest
My wanton snake eyed charmer
Dancing only to the best tunes
Sinuously moving to a rhythm
Hypnotically vicious as a wet dream
Compulsive as the masturbator’s motion
As compelling as a large scale disaster
We don’t dare pause to consider
That our impulsive night games
Are careering right out of control
Skidding towards the concrete barrier
Even if we did do you doubt
That we would press down hard
Accelerating loosening seatbelts
Elatedly bracing for the impact
Of the ultimate folie a deux
A drastic re-configuration of identity
But come there are so many more
Games we could play in the darkness
I see you staring back at me in the bar
We are strangers meeting for the first time
That illicit thrill a depth charge to the core
I know of a hotel around the corner
A fine and private place I’m assured
Once alone together I promise
To do you so good to do you so right
Make you experience the exquisite
Head fucking psycho-drama of attraction
Once again this time with renewed emotion
Believe me I am never more serious
Than when I am playing night games

Intimacy

Rene Magritte-The Lovers 1928

All you ever
All you ever wanted
All you ever needed
All you ever
All you ever looked for
Was that intrusion of intimacy
At first, maybe just a glance,
Then the fleeting touch
That lingers for a brief instance
Suggestive of a succession of eternities
Something yet still more
Than the fiction of painless friction
A sovereign surrender
A paradoxical return to the self
Urging to merge together
Indivisible diversity
Rushing towards a paradise
Of blissful annihilation
All we ever sought
All we ever
All we ever tried to find
In tired old hotel bedrooms
Where the leaky faucets
Taps out a tedious tattoo
On the cracked enamel
All we ever
Amongst the haphazardly scattered
Bricks of centuries old ruins,
Beneath a uniform sky
The very denial of colour
All we ever desired
On the encroaching beach
Torching the landscape
With its scorched earth strangeness
All we ever tried to do
In the wasteland littered
With bric-a-brac and detritus,
The untold story of a million lives
Struggle for pleasure,
Was to become intimate
To really feel someone other,
To escape the terror
However briefly,
Even for an instance,
Of the All-Seeing I.

All I ever needed
All I ever wanted
All I ever
Was your intimacy.

A Throw of the Dice

A Throw Of The Dice Doesn’t Abolish Chance

There is a good chance that my collection Motion No. 69 will be published sometime in November, 2017. As well as providing certain recherche pleasures Motion No. 69 will disclose under a close and attentive reading the workings of Shangri-La, that game of total chance that is said to originated in Xanadu but was more probably created in the boardroom of Hilton-Tetragrammaton Pan-Dimensional Inc.

So buy the book* and then maybe you will be able to stake your claim and with the combination of a turn of a card, the spin of a wheel and the throw of the dice make your appointment with destiny. The possibilities are infinite: you could find yourself up above the clouds in the Imperial Suite at The Very Heaven Heavenly Hotel with a bed the size of Hy-Brasil or Cockaigne, sipping from a Jeroboam of Krug Clos d’Ambonnay with your significant other, or if the fates are against you end up down there alone on street level with hell around every corner. Or maybe, even more bizarrely, nothing will change at all.

*Over 18’s only. Terms and Conditions Apply. Strictly pay to play. Please gamble responsibly.  And remember, a throw of the dice doesn’t abolish chance.

The Very Heaven Heavenly Hotel

Hotel Corridor Circa 2027

I would like to invite my dear readers to an assignation in The Very Heaven Heavenly Hotel, which is located somewhere in the stratosphere, just outside the Strip, quite near Paradise. The only possible way to get there at the present time is to buy my forthcoming collection, my first, Motion No. 69, which will be published shortly, details to follow when they become apparent.

For anyone interested in this trip and a taste of Cake with a cup of tea, please leave comments below. All enquiries that attract my attention will be answered in a timely fashion.