Please don’t let them clean up Coney Island—
Let the Cyclone’s wooden bones ricket and splinter
While the neon splendor of Nathan’s dominates the corner of Stillwell & Surf
Let’s pitch our pennies at ever-unreachable holes
And skee-ball down the Fascination alleys
Eat contaminated corn on the cob drawn from week-old water in streetside tins
Leave morning-after condoms on the shrinking beach
Where shrieking gulls war over silver garbage bins
We all need something dirty & familiar that we can call home
Like the linoleum crack where you hid things as a kid
Or the junk drawer in the kitchen that everybody has to have
Something dirty & familiar and aging ungracefully
So come south from the Bronx, south from Manhattan
Take the
or the 
or the 
or the 
and GO!
...till you can’t go no more
It’s the last stop in Brooklyn, the asshole of the city
And you can clean it every day, but still the shit will come
So let the rotten cotton candy melt around our sinning tongues
While old men shoot dice against shuttered carney walls
And ancient sideshow barkers hawk their boardwalk wares
Along the sand and grit of the land on the spit that's known as Coney Island