Sunshine Hotel
You haven’t lived until you’ve been in a flophouse
with nothing but one lightbulb
and 56 men squeezed together on cots.
With everybody snoring at once,
and some of those snores so deep and gross and unbelievable
dark, snotty, gross subhuman wheezings from hell itself.
Your mind almost breaks under those deathlike sounds
and intermingling odors of hard, unwashed socks,
pissed and shitted underwear.
And over it all, slowly circulating air
much like that emanating from uncovered garbage cans.
And those bodies in the dark, fat and thin and bent
Some legless, armless.
Some mindless.
And worst of all, the total absence of hope.
It shrouds them and covers them totally.
It’s not bearable.
Those men were all children once.
What has happened to them?
And what has happened to me?
It’s dark and cold out there.
-Nathan Smith
