As sweet teenagers drowsily drink, as young lovers intertwine to toast
A ghost –a dream,
Lilith stagnates in the corner, moss kissing her skin.

Some boulevard glinting in the distance reads, some Sunset framed in metal says:
Some women fade into the night, some dames traipse woozily to death.

Tonight, it’s Lilith with her Mae West hips, Lilith with the Leatrice whisper
Thrusting, poet, towards feminine decay, Dying, dreamer, in the girlish fashion.

Even now her lips could lick the dark out of night, she still burns orange-Odeon bright
For the sons of Adam, for the babbling babes of Man
To go asunder, or perhaps to falter.

(A preemptive widow, a mourner waiting by the altar
She smelled the absent rib, breathed in the black keys of his piano bones.)

But she ties the ribbon round her waist, still binds her breasts with heavy twine
To remember that she loved him. To bear in mind her brutal duty.

We share the courtesy of razor wire, and bound by the same tribute
We stalk the lonely houses of our past, and curse the empty homes of the heart.

These ventricles like yawning cathedrals, these veins chiming with silence
And calling us to prayer, asking us to bow our foreheads to Memory.

We owe you this haunting, we chase your children to tumble rightly
Into a connection, into some pretense of your touch.

She, for Adam, winds her hair into the veil. I, for you, turn follicles to folly:
Only children pull pigtails; only fools mistake bruises for love.

Forgotten Paramount paramour, MGM Madonna –
Theda Bara, Musidora, silent queens of a quiet age.

Lilith campaigns for absinthe, sloppily bangs her sugar and carafe
For the Great-Binge way, for the wormwood rustling in her veins.