Edmund the Confessor

The pay phone is broken.
The night manager reads the horoscopes
     from the day before—
does he ever think,
     “These aren’t for today.
          They were yesterdays”?
I don’t know,
and I don’t know if the pay phone
     has succumbed
     to heart break, existential pain,
          abuse, being used,
       or if it's waiting for an assignation.
I hear a woman, at the phone next to mine, say,
          “I’m here now”—
but I’m not,
          I don’t know where I am.
     My ink has already stained the bed spread.
     The ink bleeds now
          in the phone book.

I think Edmund the Confessor
will be waiting for me in hell.

The woman next to me gets up—
          I think she’s disappointed.
     I want to offer her a cigarette,
but more than that
I want to use the phone.
What am I doing here, I think,
     because I know this shouldn’t matter,
yet it does
and I don’t know why
I just move on.

A king, I remember, must always be a king.
A lover, once consigned to the role,
     must be a lover,
even if it's wrong.