My Friend Marcie is on the Insensate Beach

or by the dinking pool, or in the triumphant park.
She’s sliding over pages of a magazine,

her scent is the scent of the sun: that stark and naked mistress,
who in her blinding coruscation, burns off her very own bikini,

who’ll flash off underwear, a business suit and overcoat
quicker than she can summon them, already smouldering, to mind.

She’s up there, bare as you like, her hair blazed to ash
and ash itself, in this blank heat, flared back to scratch,

before a damp and follicled root could jibber, blinking, into life,
before the quick, initial sting could even muster

to the judding pole of self. The alopecia sun, her porn star muff,
buff as these soft dreams I entertain of her,

my immolating, self-cremating angel,
who turns my coal-black words to molecules of slag,

whose salted tears cannot even jig as spit upon a frying pan.
She’s squatting in her protest, her hollered rage at me,

her blasphemy, is in the shine on the magazine.
Its gloss is bouncing up all over Marcie like a rash.