I had just one blanket need
Last bleary evening when I hailed a cab at
Bond and Edmondson. I was no more than
An article of clothing at a showgirl's command.
I was a ghost picked up by a phantom
Who will let you be a celebrity
On one last moonshine ride to the hatted goons at the border,
Or worse. The cabbie, gazing at the unimaginable,
Muttered familiar particulars as I told him where we were going,
To Pulaski highway, leaving one neighborhood of dim joints for another.
He inquired of my sick motives, keening on twisted sexual apocalypses
That leave one hanging, rendezvous in blue rooms with red electrified vixens;
No, there are those motels on the strip, I said,
But it's further in, so he took me past
The lumberyards and post offices and all the outposts of the sexually mistaken night,
Every regulated act searing in neon, up the salmon-spawning red-hot road,
I let him carry me where he, if he had been totally free, would go,
Where those who have no one or nothing go, holding on to the last stool of extremity;
He was taking me to see my baby.
He is hesitant at the roadhouse destination, hearing
That Patsy Cline was alive and living in the jukebox,
And seeing the blue pool tables and the cigarette machines dispensing decades-old brands,
Still, for 10 bucks extra, he handed me over like a parcel.
My baby smiles at me from behind the bar
While a scatological scattershot shovels quarters into the jukebox
And half dead wails of the lonely give him some small consolation,
The songs of the missing angel. He, who had spent his whole
Childhood in the nearby motels, was moved and purified enough
By this song to make you feel he'd had his heart ripped clean out.
And then he buys me a drink, because I'm Shelly's boy,
While a model of the Statue of Liberty rotates on the bar TV.
