NO EXORCIST 'TILL ARBOR DAY


Sister Goldenhair & Steamboat Annie
ain't your friends no more-- Bad Sneakers
in the Toyota Celica, your lips all around
that codeine, you came when
the ghost hit the windshield, spun out
beside Kowloon, bombastic in the fuck
motels, a mouthful of SPF 15 & to hell
with your parochial ivy & your Derrida &
the historic first block of Marlborough Street
where the dawn dragged me nonplussed
as that equinox & I was never your
dead God nor your ballgagged IT
professional, following a snake outside
the Church of Christian Science, not your Iceland
nor your Munch-tongue, the soft white sand
could never guess why the front broke
the sky & the creep jerking off in
the bombed-out dancehall, they moan
for your sinister devices, Zombi
Mardi-gras, elephantine All Souls' fresco
cascading Gin-blight, Blood Sugar
Baby I cried for you all winterlong,
your spectre, your dirty Heathcliff, no
fire on the mountain, no cigarettes: fodder
for your analyst, take your phantom thighs
& let me be, the fire ants climb the chakras &
I had to leave the brown light & the
bar murk where I borrowed my own name
to pay the boatman, prodigal footsoldiers
of that flatlined rapture, the coy
waitresses remember me & how
dismally you disappeared your
alligator sweat into those hallowed
halls of better men & the flaccid canon:
I beg you Coney Island, I beg
you Vineyard Haven I beg you
Virginia get your soft disasters
out of my sun.