These places were just shit holes
Until Hollywood ruined them.
Salem was nothing but tannery wreckage
Until Bewitched came to town
And now it's the spookiest place on earth
When every October comes around.
The Perfect Storm devastated Gloucester
Where fishermen could once afford to live.
Now everyone comes to take a selfie
With the gale sailor clutching at the wheel.
Rockport, same deal, a lobster insignia
After the B-52s bombed them down down.
Even Manchester-by-the-Sea
Hosts intervention weekends.
They've been trading in goods
For a long long time here,
And now Siberian crabapples
Hang on Confucius's manbun
And a nickle harpa plays bourees from Brittany
In Christmas Major
But at Dogtown Books, with their signed Allen Ginsberg,
They don't know who Charles Olsen is
Though he wrote his Maximus opus
On the same street as the Wicked Peacock.
Such was his dissolute life,
It can't be reduced to fantasy
A seagull seems to scream at me
Like ghosts of girlfriends past
For the way things used to be
Before civilization ended
And all the efforts to fight churches
With taverns went largely unrecorded,
Unlike the preachers who perished on the rocks
On the way to save the incorrigible.
They moved the portraits into the homes
To spackle more of history's holes.
