Phillip
by John Doyle
Phillip’s sage Frankie
tunes us in to Kurt the Cunt,
funny way to grace
Sundays, south Dublin witnessing Copenhagen’s dark descents. Phillip’s upstairs
making strange noise
accompanied by his wife—your
sister sometimes—when she’s not making you crash your car
tuned into
passive-aggressive phone calls.
Hoochie—such a placid dog—trots half-moon
shapes
on middle-class Dublin’s eighth
most desired garden—
according to your
dad,
carrying a hand grenade in
his chest that soon will make redundant your civil wars.
Phillip’s still
upstairs.
All I need to know is what
those noises are. Intercourse is the last thing a din like that gives birth to.
Feed me with this
knowledge. Then I can leave—eternally—
go back to wonderful Copenhagen,
take up where we never
left off,
save the smack-head youth
from the clutches of
Kurt the Cunt. When Pisces defiles Gemini I’ll
return
on Sheriff Calhoun’s
horse, a horse so beautiful the Bible forbids its death, I’ll find out if
Phillip’s still upstairs,
ask your sister what this
all meant,
if it gets that perverse
and twisted
John Doyle
likes to write poems about James Garner, Ella Fitzgerald, and Bertie Windsor.
Sometimes he writes about other stuff, too.
