A Shot Across the Bow!

The Bumble Bee

Is it really all sex, Whitman, the bee’s roving search,
An insectual lust to deflower?
Or has a groining sting left you to swing in the lurch?
Your golden years spent in trysts in the bower?

Can we see the gold bands, in the midst of the black?
And remember the hive’s geometry?
When the bee sticks his stinger he dies for the lack.
And the sexagons sharply shape the honey.

We agree that droning is not Nature’s best way.
But your America likes to drone nowadays.
I wonder if you could see Her mowed parkways,
What would your lusty old beard have to say?

Daring! Foolish! Not a very good poem! Perhaps you fancy yourself brave, though you write anonymously. Are you trying to hide from the wrath of a dead poet scorned? This is wise. I took it upon myself in my earliest scribblings (193-), to take a few potent pot-shots at poets-in-arms. How I suffered for my daring diatribes! I too aimed a few too many lines at old Walt.
His curse is a bodily one. The morning after I sent my draft to the publisher, I awoke sprawled in my bed, on fire with a raging lust of a most peculiar kind. I craved the touch not of a woman, but of anything. My body was indeed Electric, though I had not the presence of mind to sing its praises. I spent an hour merely extricating myself from the caress of my velvet bedsheets. It was all I could do to maintain my chastity, which up until that point had been relatively safe! You can imagine how my day was spent, resisting the dread, clinging Eidolons of every object that came within my purview. Luckily I did not have the inclination to commune with my razor, for the only way to rid oneself of the curse, so my mentor told me, is to grow a strapping beard! Take heed! Don’t shave!