REDOUBT

by Phil Lane

Straitjacketed in
for a two-hundred mile
burn, brain burns
like bloodshot sky,
my only compensation:
the confinement
of a smoking room,
the comfort of
complimentary coffee
brewed by some Blonde
Brick Shithouse
(the grateful type)
but
I am almost thirty,
and I don’t fuck
her because I’m
not a man,
because
the alarm clock ticks
like red rain, the blue,
blue morning unfolds
like an eyelid,
the hungover sun
gleams,
a pisshole
in the sky,
first frost white
as cocaine glaze
on gingerbread rooftops:
‘tis the season
to muddle through
somehow, to light
the lights, follow
the formalities,

but
out of the evening’s ennui
gathers a blinding snow squall
which leaves me blind,
leg-locked, guilt-ridden,
the delirious, trembling
traffic tangles in
my veins,
all my thoroughfares
jammed in the stasis
of morning,

awake in a different
city swaddled by
the same old skin;
two-hundred miles
and my only
compensation:
the rhapsody of rain
on the road, the hum
from the hole
of the whore
called home, fragrant
like formaldehyde
and fixed as a
flagpole that never
gets furbished—