Bee Stung Sensible

She's all frost blonde bee stung lips

and half frivolous shoes,

swaying, tripping, on the nod,

settling into my ghost horizon.

She whispers sour and warm

to my sweet icy edges,

contemplating a tender burn

of steely wool failings.

-----

The subway takes me back downtown,

she follows drifting on a tide

of corporate sweat

from the workaday bodies

stacked like cordwood on the F train.

-----

Cupid creeps stalking his prey

on Bowery north of Houston,

writing Valentine's Day poems

on the back of dead band flyers,

torn off telephone poles

and abandoned holy shrines,

blown haunting down Bleeker

after the spectre of Joey Ramone.

I toast them righteous

with a goblet full of glass,

in the end bloody doomed

to shit out the shards

into tenement toilets

of artists unbowed.

-----

Side stepped sick to my soul

down the alleyways of promise

past a rain tickled insolence

free of ethics and ideals,

I taste sulfur and circumstance

and the cyanide of seekers,

when all along she's merely bleached,

free of stingers and the stung:

tied off,

pushing a hot shot

into her hell bound panic;

surfing plasma,

left to fade.