Best and Worst

Hotel Rex is my least favorite of his poems. It only deals with being depressed in a hotel room and talking about what we all find familiar about them. It seems like he had nothing to say, but went on writing anyway. It is a short poem that conveys the fact that people come to hotels, do their business and leave, only for someone else to come the next day and start the process over. It left me looking for a deeper meaning that never came.

Hotel Rex

Looming over the little sewing kit

and the miniature bottles of shampoo

and conditioner, I am a giant--

a king standing before the royal mirror

in an enormous robe of terrycloth.

As a sign of my benevolence,

I will forego coffee

from room service and check out early

before my tiny subjects arrive

to wash their hair and mend their simple attire.

(Collins Billy 2007)

Writing in the afterlife caught my attention more than any of the other poems that he published. He has a great imagination, along with the ability to describe it to you. In this poem you can imagine yourself sitting in one of the boats, wondering what to write. This is one of his best examples of having the ability to describe a surreal scene and convey its meaning. It also found it amusing that an English professor would view the afterlife as a writing exercise.

Writing in the Afterlife.

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,

shot with pristine light,

not this sulphurous haze,

the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,

but no one mentioned all the boats,

their benches crowded with naked passengers,

each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child

with a model train and a model tunnel,

and I knew I would not live forever,

jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side

and the clink of the final coin

in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,

but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived

we would be asked to describe this place

and to include as much detail as possible—

not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,

not simply the shackles, but the rusty,

iron, ankle-shredding shackles—

and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,

our thoughts and feelings about being dead,

not really an assignment,

the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,

think of writing as a process,

a never-ending, infernal process,

and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,

and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

(Collins, Billy 2002).