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—

I’M GLAD YOU ARE AT PEACE

by Phil Lane

Don’t care
if you wait for me on Hope Rd.
I will meet you in the middle of I-99
beyond interchanges of sterile desert
the carnal crunch of wrecks
on the highway

Don’t care
if you see me in the clouds
young naked toeing the tightrope
dancing on the storm
above your seething garden party

Don’t care
if I never reach the mountain with you
the peak obscured by my dancing
love poisonous in this climate and
my fear of heights suddenly returning

Don’t care
about the blood on the bathroom tile
the rat inside the ceiling fan
my convenient disease helps me
forget to remember—

I STARTED OUT ON BURGUNDY

by Phil Lane

The more I drink
the more I enjoy these
orbital hangovers,
A dangerous proposition,
to be sure

the same thing happened with
opium and women
I once believed myself
a shaman,
swimming in the river
behind the river

but it’s not the drug
that makes the man,
awake in pools of lithium
with my tangible demise
Fun, Fun, Fun
‘til morning takes my T-Bird away
and the lizard is sick
in some hospital ward
wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper

gotta get something strong
before it all comes to life
and the adding machine cuts me
with her steel erection—