The Ballad of the Oakley Hotel

A story half-forgotten I’ll tell you just now,
of the people who lived in the Oakley Hotel;
drunkards they were, drank out of sorrow & spite
spelunking in bottles to the depths of the night.
 
They had their own bar on the first floor of the place
where they drank like dry rivers until the floor was in face;
the flowing pace was set by well drinks ribald & cheap
upstairs on rusted beds, fucking, the springs loudly creak.
 
They drank until dawn while the piano was playing
until their livers were chewed by vultures buffeting.
Some called it a flophouse, rent was paid by the day
I called it a funhouse, where I learned how to pray.
 
Some weeks we were flush with lines of cocaine
other weeks, just lushes huffing paper bags of butane.
Insane as it was, our brains never cracked on the crack
except over horse money lost to horses down at the track.
 
When money was tight you could always find sterno
or if your looks were just right film amateur porno.
No shortage of drama, melt downs like 1986 Chernobyl
when thrown into jail over that brunette named Sibyl.
 
I’m not here to quibble, I can barely recollect
but one time I got so plastered I thought to genuflect
and recount all my sins in the safety of confessional.
Until the bottle called back, & I worked it professional.
 
There were times when the cops to our humble home called
to break up the brawls and stomps that had neighbors appalled,
and another fine fellow would be hauled to the slammer
just for flying off the handle at Old Ray’s stuttered speech stammer.
 
Behind us in the factory the welders and machinists did work
three shifts of hard labor at A&R Industries with hardly a perk;
we’d just sit there and drink, when they went home or went in
it didn’t matter what: beer, wine, bourbon, whiskey or whiskey and gin.
 
Sometimes there was nothing, we’d go find Robitussin
the walls would start breathing, and I’d start a cussin'
and my liver would hurt from where that old vulture had chewed
and eventually I’d sleep after my vomit was spewed.
 
There was the time we lit fireworks on the Fourth of July,
and that crack flash whizz bang spun into my old ladies eye.
Then the ambulance came down to check out her cornea,
but it didn’t stop the cruel laughter that gave her son hernia.
 
One night came the fire from a cigarette smolder
nobody would admit who had lit the tobacco briquette
no one had heard the siren sound, over the agro punk cassette
to my friends who choked on the smoke, I call it regret
and file it away, deep in my brain, in a do-not-touch-folder.
 
AA came for some when bottoms were hit
and some said AA was a bucket of shit.
Eminent domain put an end to us at the hotel in Oakley,
wrecked down by the ball of the law, not quite baroquely.
​
In the place it once stood now suburbanites go shopping
gone is that old sawdust smell, in its place fresh blacktopping. 

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REFLECTION:

I am attempting to do my part to make poetry gutter punk again. This one in the Underdog Anthems series is about a real place in Cincinnati that my dad used to tell me stories about, a flophouse called the Oakley hotel, it was right behind where he worked as a welder and there was always lots of drama. Later, during my first stint in AA as a teenager, my sponsor, an older punker, had lived in the Oakley Hotel. He took me and some of his other sponsees around to Oakley Hotel one time and we were talking to a lady there. I accidentally knocked down her bottle of cheap whiskey and broke it or spilled it. (Memory is fuzzy.) He then drove us to the liquor store where we got a bottle to replace what she had lost. Years later my sponsor fell off the wagon and we’d get hammered together at punk shows… We've since lost track of eachother and I haven't seen him around in a long time.

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