The Booze Talking

“Goethe, who knew modern man’s daimonic urges intimately, as shown in so eloquently in Faust, remarks, ‘The daimon is the power of nature.’ But the important characteristic of the daimon is that the one element within the personality which has its rightful function as a part of the personality, can itself usurp power over the whole self, and this drives the person into disintigrative behavior...

“‘Eros is a mighty daimon,’ said Diotima, the authority on love among Plato’s banqueting friends. The daminoic is correlated with eros rather than libido or sex as such. ... When Freud introduces Eros as the opposite to and adversary of libido, i.e., as the force that stood against the death-instinct and fought for life, he was using Eros as this way which includes the daimonic. The daimonic fights against death, fights always to assert its own vitality, accepts no “threescore and ten” or other timetable of life. It is this daimonic which is referred to when we adjure someone seriously ill not to give up the fight.

- Rollo May, “Psychotherapy and the Daimonic.” in Myth, Dreams and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell




THE BOOZE TALKING

Oct. 2004

Blame it on the booze for
merging your face in hers.
Given the general slurry
of those pouring nights,
such confusions weren’t
surprising, though you
nor she nor I have since
forgiven me. She
stepped off one nights’s
wave of alcholic sleaze
and then we found ourselves
in a room where dawn’s
pale mordents were
streaming through every
blue window. Yowza the heat
I felt in her when she
unzipped and wrapped
her soft legs around
my hips, her loins
as hot and moist as
as my name which
tore from her lips as
she came again and
again, my full weight
and fullness plowing
and plunging & plundering
her with an empty
heart’s naked greed.
Afterward we were two
strangers deep in love
with nary a clue how to
proceed beyond that
apple-isle’s wave-tossed
bed. Not me, at least,
and of her own fall
what can I say? I loved
her too much to grant
her mortal falter, and so
was like a stag in the
headlights of approaching
doom. The same mouth
that sucked me dry
& whispered how she
wanted all my children
spoke all the later words
of bile and choler and
oh-so-blue-rue. How could
such magnificent breasts
be rounded with that
boredom she eventually
felt with me, pointing
them on toward the next
more manly man? And
so when all those hurts
invaded me, descending
wraith-like from the moon
to fever my brain, I knew
the daily barbs and ice
which was breaking us
back in two were the
fault of my own fool’s
equipage in the wiser
ways of love. What could
I really say to her when
my tongue was inked
in your pure honey?
Always in that awful clinch
where love in real
lovers is daily made
I’ve quailed, my
equipage both
insufficient and too
gossamer, tooled to you
who beamed that sickly
aura behind every
woman that I’ve loved.
How many loves have
ebbed from the women
I’ve loved because I
didn’t fight with them?
As if a marriage rode
on a husband’s willingness
to defy and even curse you
in some real love’s darker
name. Sorry Charley,
my history’s assembled
feline choir hymns,
we don’t want tuna
with good taste, we
need a fish to whup
some ass. That feral
dolphin which the
naked man rides upon
my father’s family
crest ain’t no lap-puppy.
But when will I
ever learn to lose
you in my heart?
Back to my story --
and when those
soaring soggy spumes of
love had ebbed in
a collapse of closing doors,
how I mooned for her
and you in the you-in-her
of iced vodka’s slurry
drowse. I was like
a man tossed from the
sea and exiled on
a bitter shore where
all my fellow drowned
Jolly Rogers assembled
at the bar to drink
all night and stare
at their reflections
across the bar, repeating
the words we could or
should have said
to keep you-in-her
from sailing forever away.
But it was just the
booze talking, speaking
loud to no one the
awful secret you hold
like a finger to our lips.
Who do we love anyway,
and what is it that we
greet when all the sheets
have been torn from
that infernal book
on which we bed all dreams?
Beyond the heart’s thalassa
is this discriminating rage,
a will to fight to the
end of all poems,
making certain things
at last clear and clean.
Not by your providence
but my victory, dread queen,
will I ink that page at last.
Beyond your dread similitudes
are seas without a same
and salt in sheer infinitude
and feelings you’ll never fully name
no matter how much booze
it took to drink
before my you-in-her was weaned.




THE BLACK RIDER

Oct. 14

He is my backassed rider,
my hellbent delighter,
the slicksweet gall
hived in th every
dread center of
my wrong
desire to die diving
all the way.
He will not take No
for an answer, he takes
no prisoners & he’s
always gone before
first light. He’s
the scourge of
all panties scattered
on the way to
bed or left hanging
from an ankle,
a scornr of
foreplay and
rubbers. Oh he’s a
bad boy all right,
the poster child
of delight, just
smilin’ away
with hell’s mouth.
Boozed up and
boogied down he
carouses in bottle
clubs til 6 a.m.,
freighting from
those pickled lees
the next giggling
Giselle aboard
his blackout saddle.
He’ll die drunk maybe
driving her home
or kill her or
someone else on
the road if the Fates
don’t opt to string
him further down
the dread lines
of appetite. Sequestered
back at her room
or his just as day-yolk
surely spreads,
he devours that
palegirl’s bones
with a jones for
jolly rogers in
the salty lockers
of the night.
Many times he
passes out taking
her all the way.
I take a drink
and it’s he who thinks
it a splendid idea to
head out for a little
fun; it is him
sawing that smooth
bad fiddle when I imagine
myself walk some tightly
packed room where
every pussy swoons.
He’s singing in my
ear as I imagine myself
a Bond, the hero in
with a thousand tight
blue jeans pulled
down the ankles of
one night. And when
I’ve had enough to
drink he really spreads
his wings, cawing loud
and lewdly from
the belfry which
bells from balls to cock
to tongue, spiralling
Satanic poetry
across the hallows
of the night, arch,
arcane, pure indigo,
with the black wit
of an Iago making
moves while the
king sleeps. He is
the shadow of
my thrall of
love and life,
the spectre swimming
in libido’s wake
singing in dread
bubbles the
drear drowned view
inside my evil ear,
the rebellious one
on the left side of
my sense. His news
have such force and
flavor that heeding
is too dangerous
to embrace and
too delightful to resist.
Good thing for
all of us that a
bigger beast than he
swims even deeper down
with flukes he is
but the bad imagining of.
My black rider’s
but a mere shiver
of freeze which that
darker beast swims
with an ease as
natural as me
sitting here &
writing all this down.
Maybe that bad
boy is the deep god’s
angel, winging me
through bad years
to the ledge of
depths mere
darkness could not
dive to on dark
savoring alone.
I was rounded here
by a great black turn
which sailed me
far from home
aboard a melancholy
ship captainned by
a bolt-seared mentor.
He hurled his ship
straight through
the Cape of awful
dreams & on to
doom just to feel
his harpoon pierce
the whiteness of
the whale, thrusting
red and merry
as the beast dove
down for good.
I alone survived
to sail back here
the chastened
chastised man, with
only an empty box
of ravaged nights
to found the house
that followed. And
did, and give thanks
today for surviving
that dark man’s
yahoos on the
dread surge of
black loins. Yet I
know he’s never all
that far from here,
he’s always just
below inside behind,
brimming shot
glass of brimstone
in one hand, the other
on black reins, ever
waiting to make
room for me on
his saddle and
ride out again
to the deep end
of the surge
with its pink
nipples of wild
foam & the champagne
toast which ends
it all, loosing the
cork beneath
my heart’s eventual
home inside that
wilder beast below.




“The daimonic needs to be directed, channeled: and here human consciousness is important. ... Consciousness can integrate the daimonic. This is the purpose of psychotherapy.

“Native psychotherapy often shows us exceedingly interesting and revealing ways of dealing with the daimonic. Dr. Raymond Prince, a psychiatrist who lived and studied with the natives of Yoruba for a number of years, filmed a fascinating ceremony which I offer here as illustration.

“When the tribal mental healer is to treat some members of the community for what we would call psychological ailments, the whole village participates. After the usual rituals of the casting of bones and a ceremony that is believed to transfer the problem -- be it sexual impotence or depression or whatnot -- to a goat who then (as the “scapegoat”) is ceremonially slaughtered, everybody in the village joins together for serval hours of frenzied dancing. In the dancing, which constitutes the main part of the healing, the significant point is that the native who wants to be cured identifies with the figure he believes has daimonic possession of him.

“... What is necessary for the ‘cure,’ then, is that he confront and come to terms with this ‘demon’ in himself.

‘... In the frenzied dance he then ‘invites the daimonic,’ welcomes it. He not only confronts the devil toe to toe, but accepts her ((in the case of an impotent man with an evil mother complex)), identifies with her, assimilates and integrates her as a constructive part of himself -- and hopefully becomes both more gentle and sensitive as a man and sexually potent.

“... The principle is, identify with that which haunts you, not in order to fight it off, but to take it into yourself; for it must represent some rejected element in you.

-- May, ibid., (italics are the author’s)

***


ICED VODKA

From “A Breviary of Guitars,” 2000

Winter 1985-86:
It was a poise,
a pose imagined
by loveless thrall:
Pure surface
glistening with
night dew and
the addict’s sense
of dusk, all
possibilities
enfolded in
lips of cherry
red & midnight
blue: A
rococo sirocco
blowing tumbleweeds
through a dusty
deserted
necropolis:
Big night music
for a fin de
siecle swine:
There is a
taste for iced
vodka during
such sunsets,
Stolichnya and
tonic on
the rocks,
an ice pick
of bitter clarities
to plunge in
the eye of love:
Out one night
I bump into
Parke and Jeff
again who have
this sax player
Paul in tow and
they say man
are you ready
to rock? We
couldn’t make
anything happen
before but
everyone wants
that to
be different
now, dying as
we were in
the hiatus
of drinking
gone sour without
a band’s edge:
We high-five
and plan a
practice the
next Sunday,
and the thought
of a band puts
a fuse into
the dark iciness
that had settled
over me colder
than the winter
without: A
small burning
place where I
hope I’ll survive
my own embalmings:
But come Sunday
something’s up
& practice
is called off &
instead I
go to a Bears
playoff party
where Norman
and I celebrate
an old home
team’s victory in
a town where
victory is
rare & truly
sweet: Up in
Soldier Field on
a bright frozen
afternoon our
Bears annihilated
the Rams with
an offense as
potent as its
lockjaw defense
& victory is
like a belt of
Stoli slammed
down with beers
& coke & pot:
Fired on that
victory I
race on out
into the cold
night to a
deserted Fern
Park Station where
some tiny topless
dancer joins
me & we drink
drink drink
from there to
ABC lounge &
my cold cold
apartment &
we cant fuck
because she’s
on her period
but I masturbate
against her belly
& shoot ribbons
of coke Stoli
across her
small taut nipples
& watch me
freeze there:
She tells me
of her biker old
man who’s threatened
to kill her
2 daughters &
I hold her in
the bitter dawn
of a ruined
Monday as she
cries & cries
& we tumble
into a mutually
vapid dark: The
following Tuesday
night I’m out
jamming with
Parke & Jeff at
the sax player
Paul’s house, trying
to enthuse for
their brand of
power funk,
feeling tense
& unacclimed to
a power poise that
feels somehow
long passed over:
But what else
is there to
do? The next
night out with
Norman getting drunk
& in a late
blackout drunk
I call Donna
who speaks with
me little & rings
off: The next day
I can’t recall
anything she said:
It’s all iced vodka
folks, puer Stoli:
A collection
agency gets tough
with me trying
to collect on
my old college
loans & I
hear doom again
in my finances:
I look about
that ruined den
of an apartment,
that icy
shattered
shipwrecked
herpes blister
of a space I
call home:
And think, geez,
I could lose all
this: Practice
with the boys
starts to heat
up as we find
some groove
we can tolerate
if not inhabit:
Ah but is
that just too late:
My car is
ever worse for
my hard wear, won’t
start in the
cold: There is
no sense of
personal ignition
either, only
the dry bone
clattering friction
of ice cubes knocking
against each other
in the dark:
One clear cold
hungover morning
that January we
went up on
the roof of
the newspaper’s
production center
to watch the
space shuttle
Columbia launch —
it must have been
25 degrees or
so that morning —
Seconds after
the bright plume
lifted from
the east all
went haywire, a
helterskelter of
smoke and
nothing more:
Everyone raced
down to the
newsroom to
watch the replays
on TV of
the explosion
again and again
and again, all
of us mute
witnesses to
the failure of
so many dreams,
the loss of
some small
remaining
innocence in
us all: Recognizing
right then
how things fail,
pieces tumbling
in a slow q
smoky glissade
down to the
cold sea: Iced
vodka, crystal
clear, a heart
immobile as
a frozen angel
tumbling from
the sky into
the shot glass sea:
If I learned
anything that
awful final
season of guitars,
it was how
truly far you
can fall holding
a guitar the
wrong way: How
dread the
destination
of motions borne
out of the
shadows of
true love,
true work,
true singing:
Commence here
a winter
rabid with
drunk fucks, my
cock given over
to the folds
of soggy night
dowsing with a
dread clarity
for the worst
receptive loins:
Having given
up the ghost
of love, there
is only bottom
feeding in the
bone fires of
the moon: After
the Bears won
the Super Bowl
O tore up
to Fern Park
Station bladed
with triumph
dipped in sour
mash & rounded
up some girl
in a Bears t-shirt
who had big tits
hauling her &
her fat friend
& some vagrant
back to my
icy dark
apartment —
set the other
couple in the
kitchenette
with a blanket
and then maul
Bears girl
into my bed
hauling off
that t-shirt
and pressing her
head down on
my cock: brown
hair & long loose
teats flapping
heave ho as
I came richly
into her throat
& then passed
out: Come dawn
I kicked em
all out & buried
myself in
the rough wool
of shame no
sleep can erase:
Out a few nights
later getting
drunk at Bailey’s
& back into
the Crocodile
Club to dance
with this Puerto
Rican girl who
loves my first
name Jonathan
-- “Chonaton
won’t you come
home with me,”
she sang as
we left the
club at closing
time: How easy
those harbors
when you have
fully released
any semblance
of belief in
real connection:
Her room is
sweet with stuffed
animals & photos
of her family
back in PR, very
girlish stuff
but when she
takes me in
her bed she
is a woman who
knows what she
wants and its
hot buttered
rumba ooh lah
lah an oiled
clench of tropic
spurts I can
sing but not
linger long in: So
it’s off I go
the next morning
with her phone
number on a
strip of paper
that falls amid
the wreckage
of litter on
the floor of
my car: It’s
off I go for
a day of work
sleeping at
my desk &
dreaming of my
band & puzzling
how to squeeze
another $20
out of
bankruptcy for
the next night,
the next bar,
the next drunk
gallop which so
unerringly flies
toward the
cliff where her
ghost walks:
A lonely woman
in her 30s
who takes me
on skeptically
inviting me
to dinner at
her house where
her 16 year
old daughter
eyes me
venomously:
We get drunk
on wine & after
David Letterman
after all resistance
& sense has ebbed
into the wine
I press her back
into her room
where we kiss
naked on her
bed her skin
webbed with an
age I sense
approaching for
me: She won’t
fuck but sucks
me off and as
I come filling
her mouth and
greasing her
cheeks & neck
we fall fast
asleep & &
sneak out at
dawn never to
return: Hauled
some rich drunk
girl back from
the bottle club
& when she
wouldn’t let
me undress her
I waited til
she passed out
then pulled
down her pants
& panties &
fucked her
from behind: Those
first 3 months
of ‘86 I bedded
close to 20
women: At the
gym a buddy
would ask me
every time about
the latest &
usually I had
something to
say, this blonde
that bar an
apartment &
a welcome which
I took and ran
never to thank
and always forgot:
All that drunken
philandering
like deep deep
waters I not
so much swam
(for that implied
a will, which I
didn’t have) as
was hurled by
the basalt balls
of a primordial
fish, all appetite,
only in motion,
never to find
the surface
again: That I
did emerge
eventually
prayerfully
brokenly with
hard work &
acres of bruise
is as mysterious
to me now
as the guitar
I rode down then:
Though you have
to wonder what
sort of cuke-day
proceeds so
pickled in that
old brine: Once you
have heard Oran’s
satire from
the grave, what
proper church
can ever house
upon it?



“Experiencing is absolutely essential; but if it occurs without the changing of the patient’s concepts, symbols, and myths, the ‘experiencing’ is truncated, and has a masturbatory rather than full procreative power.

“The way man has gained power over the daimonic historically is by the Word. This is demonstrated in the crucial importance of knowing the name of the demon in order to overcome him.

“... Referring specifically to the drunkard’s proclivity for evading his problem through calling it everything else, ((William James)) writes:

But if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving, from all possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and is nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.

-- May, ibid. (his italics again)




THE HUNDRED ROOTS

2002

My God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots that drink in silence.

—Rilke, “Book Of Hours - 2” (transl. Bly)

I underwent some transformation
when I turned 30: quit drinking,
joined AA, got married,
settled into a family, promoted to
a professional-grade job, created
a study in a back room and began
to delve deeply into poetry and
archetypal psychoanalysis and myth.
Perhaps the tumult of change
was in proportion to the readiness
to begin which had built up like
a deep loam from so many years
of waste and longing and outer futility.
My eagerness had the cayenne
bark of zeal, slashing fast and deep,
learning slow and late.
The poetry I had set aside
for almost ten years leapt up
from roots which ad grown
without my knowing it.
Bly’s translations of Rilke’s
early poems ignited an
utterly transmuted way
of seeing within and out.
How I loved the oak trees
arching over me as I walked
to work each morning: for the
first time I felt them stretching
below in equal measure to
their apparent spread above:
Such duple plumage of seen
and known had a sexual
fusing at ground level,
thick trunk plunged in
soft earth, aching length
rising skyward ... My higher
power proved a deeper one,
a sea for which I was a pale
margin, one ecstatic beach
bum of a voice. It seemed
so strange and wild and limitless—
those first two or three years
I filled journals with huge
passages of Rilke, Bly, Hillman
and Jung, my thirst for
countervaling depths so
greedy and rapacious ...
And wrongheaded—wrong-
hearted too. My marriage
seemed impossible from
the start: our fault for
not heeding wiser voices
in AA who told us to wait
and change and grow first
before presuming to know
who we should settle with.
Old ills contended inside
and between us so fast
and hot it felt like sniper fire.
My wife fought bulimia,
the kid entered
a toothsome puberty
and I fled to my study
rather than get angry or try
to articulate better
sexual needs I didn’t know
I had any right to possess
much less express.
My job was high-anx
nitro, in the maw
of a brute corporation
eating all its young.
On my lunch hour
I’d retreat to the mezzanine
in the cafeteria or
to the patio by a
fountain when it wasn’t
too hot and then read
Antonio Machado
and Graves’ White Goddess
and Ulysses—clutching
roots which empowered me
to see far within but
could not help me
fight or cry or fuck.
I was as doomed as young
Rilke in Prague, who
walked about dressed
all in black and clutching
a pale lilac to his chest,
the young poet with
everything to say and
nothing do do about it.
I stayed on, grew, wrote:
entered therapy, joined
a men’s co-dependency group,
got divorced, then sick,
then better: wooed one
woman, then another,
then my current wife.
All the time I wrote,
most of it terrible,
but what else could I do?
The roots were in each shoe.


FETISH

... with this lack of esteem
for the subject he falls into
the fetishism of things.

— Antonio Machado


Whose nipples are those
anyway, pert and mouthable
at the butt of the moon?
Not completely yours
and never enough mine.
I could suckle til you’re
sore and sorry you ever
met me, and would I be
one sip more sated than
when I first saw you
jiggling across the street?
So it goes in the night
of self-satisfactions,
me with my tin gods
clamoring for every
raw roaring need.
It is by surrender
that we survive:
not to the too many
never sufficient
fruit on the tree,
but rather by refusing
the need altogether
and so opening into
a room I forgot as a child
with its simple
wood table and
soft sweet pears.





BACK WITH THE TIGER

1997

It was a choice of danger
over mediocrity.
Eight years of AA
taught me how to
breathe free of vapors
but not how
to stop loving
their swoon.
Now one year
back in the
cage with the tiger.
Not knowing
what happens
next. Trouble
and delight
in carnal alteration.
The tiger's purr
so infinitely close
to a red growl.




METERS FOR HELL

2001

When you’re going
through hell, don’t stop,
they told me in AA.
Virgil’s meters kept
Dante afoot through
all those fuming circles,
but what have I?
Surely not these lines,
though I crank ‘em
anyway. Sotted with
Bea’s tits bluelit
by an obstinate moon.
Ooh ooh ooh.
Now the salt sting
of love lost, the tidal
ache of a woman
I once loved well
and a life I worked
once so hard for.
All gone now because
I couldn’t set still—
Asking stones to
unbind untruths and
so forth. Oh well:
A narrow
path now traces
a third transit, perhaps
a way out. Alone
and working
hard on just one
or two poems.
A little meter inches
me forward. It there
an honest life
devoid of love?
Is that good
enough? Good God,
enough at least
of this bonehacking saw.


WHITE CHIP

2001

Air I could not breathe,
vowel I would not speak.

Bright penny of
the bitterest moon.
Ante of surrender.

Door through which
it is death to enter
and hell to refuse.

Coda to an
infinite agony.
Color of an
endless patience.

One hand held
high in room no
longer empty,
begging the
coin which begins.


DARK SUGARS

2001

Dark sugars in
bottles, blouses
and the pale chill
of vanilla ice cream:
Sirens all
of a leave-taking
for that honey isle
roamed by bears
too close to my ilk,
too shaggy in their
red hunger. I’d turn
it all over but their
reverse seems
is a surer curse,
a riven fixity bereft
of salvage.
A dry drunk corks
himself in with his thorns.
Good God, make me
willing to let go
this dangerous
preter-swilling
where even the
shadow of sugar
is insatiable.


PORTCULLIS

2001

The soul’s portcullis
on which these poems grow
is an invisible root
shaped like a prow.
Sometimes it boats toward love,
sometimes higher still.
Other times it sinks far deeper
than any diver’s bell.
In each and every direction
this trellis leads me home,
weaving stars upoon a loom,
marrowing the weaver’s bone.





EXTREME UNCTION

2005

My Cape in its darkest folds
of blue paints a mordent of hard
unction, the rock-bottomed man
sunk to his last awfulness, like a pour
of bad booze on cold nights when
there is nothing left to do but drink
to dregs and die; my voided heart
had become a screaming, wave-mashed
strait which by my passing through
to calmer times harrrowed in me
a sense of vicious unction, a man
who had outlived his own last rites.
Now that hour calls from every turning
page, wild pourings which task a
daily rage not found in daily life but
measures that time out, song
by song, grain by Cape-milled grain.
A stain of awfulness, a creed
of blackest blue, a thirst for
spilled honkeytonks beyond the
last lights of every town. The gleam
of shark teeth grow sharper
in azure, the oil squanders rich
and deep where all my extremities
grind and smash down into
a sated, wicked foam. This morning
it is cold again but the air
is droolingly sweet with the
swoon of swollen blossoms
poured from groves not far away,
a blue spring welling in the
black waters of a winter still too close.
I’m exhausted from a week
of too little sleep & too much
work & all these wild-sounding words
clicking like teeth inside my ears,
the chatter of marauding winds
inside my Cape’s dark skull,
a poem’s bad-assed piracy
on the widest seas of a hell,
some region of my mind in that
extremity while life itself
is busier and more productive
and bursting sweet with love
than any life I’ve known before.
A wild blue world’s inside
the soft green one that
landscapes this good life.
No one cares much for such songs
as this, though I comb ‘em anyway,
like a man who lives alone
on a beach at farthest extremity
from any strand warm waters reach.
Yet I sooth both, mortgaged to love
yet sailing daily to its furthest South,
writing daily verses in the darkest
hour of the night, tending this pale
garden with that Cape-man’s harrowed sight.





SPECTRE

And some in dream assured were
Of the Spirit that plagued us so;
Nine fathom deep he had followed us
From the land of mist and snow.

— Coleridge, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

He’s swimming down there,
rarely visible as he follows
me except on nights
as this, when the full moon
filters down to trace the
huge pale wings lifting
and flapping through brine
in their slow, mighty rhythm.
Tonight he unveils
from the boat’s wake,
the black sea, from these
eyes which refuse to
believe he’s down there
just as the felon in jail
swears someone else
held the scythe he
once swung with such joy.
The spectre is agile
and supple as all dreams
are in their rout of the
heart, a nine-fathom
hallows inside the dark’s flow,
neither God’s nor the
Devil’s to damn or toil
or know, older perhaps,
a Prometheus unbound
or unsounded; or an
emissary perhaps of
some approaching rage,
like a surf pounding
in total silence
or the turning of pages
too pale for any words
I have learned, but will,
or be cursed to ride
with a ghost in my hide.