I am renting a room for an hour, this time with a bed that vibrates
at the drop of a quarter, something radically different than the last
two hotels � one called A Way to Raise the Dead without a Hand
from God, the latter named Etymology: Things You Never Wanted
to Know, where I learned that at least one Mother Goose rhyme,
103 Bible passages, 83 quotes from the works of Shakespeare
and 231 English definitions contain the word �book,� a noun
when sitting in my favorite chair, a verb when trying to arrange
the perfect trifecta. I carried things with me I didn�t even know
I still had into A Way to Raise the Dead without a Hand. I spent
a week there, channeling an ex-girlfriend and the uncle who threw
himself out of my life in the span of a phone call. The suite cost
everything I loved, not including tip for room service. I scanned
a list of wines as if combing a long row of gravestones for my name.



�2007 by Frank Matagrano
first published in Sow�s Ear Poetry Review