HARLEQUIN
for Nancy Spungen

1958 Harlequin

came choking into the world.

Born under Eisenhower foliage,

below the furrow of a distant Soviet,

into the gutters of Philly’s liver.

Her cardboard-colored eyes

crested the final pubic inch of her mother

as she threw her first punch

at God

for dangling oxygen above her newborn body;

the first sign that life

was just a decomposable bribe.

An outcast cast out at conception.

A heart thug at deliverance.

Always puking inward,

Nauseating Nancy

did not live.

Temporary survivalist.

Struggle stayed with her.

Twenty years lost in youth comas—

from the playgrounds

beating boys in the face with bananas

to time-out benches

digging her painted black press-ons into her arms.

Spiked collars and rolled up dollars

post psych-ward New York,

she ripped absolutely everything

apart, salvaged only what she could

with safety pins and Percocet.

Her tongue shagged the vowels

of blah blah blah and

fuck you

and while you’re at it

fuck punk

and that dick kweef, Rotten.

She belched a contrarian’s anthem.

Spoke out against fakers in a faux English accent.

Plunged irony-deep into the satire

of her own knife collection.

Temporary survivalist.

At the Chelsea Hotel,

she swam through her blood on all fours,

the bathroom linoleum riotous with red marble.

A bleach-blond pomegranate

under morphine’s anvil.

Dragged her body back to breathless,

how a cat crawls into a garden

to kill a caterpillar before death.

She called out to her famous lover

who was mosh-pitting a harem of heroin

in another room.

1978 Harlequin.

Harlot queen for the Harlem dream.

Manhattan’s pink possum.

Nihilist to anarchy.

Hooker lover.

Her loogies still stain the streets of the Lower East,

where she lived out those lyrics she could not sing

and hummed her way into another lifetime,

cooking breakfast for a chair

that moves on its own.