La Belle D.C. Dame Sans Money and the Man From the State Department

La Belle D.C. Dame Sans Money And
The Man From The State Department

for Tina and Tiffany

He met Ms. Pussy in a Georgetown bar.
She was drinking doubles, Remy Martin,
through lips painted shocking-scarlet,
which the girls called cocksuckingred.
Her speech was a stew of London,
New York, Paris, Valley Girl and
porch-talk-under-a-Georgia-moon.
She fed him chili with her spoon.

Bowie sang: Let’s Dance, and she did.
Her hair swept the floor like a broom,
and her ass was as high as a sprinter’s,
squeezed into the gold lamé of life.

He bought a room. For an hour
she was his wife. It trembled
like a flower. Time cannot
erase the sweet moan she made

while she sat upon his face.
He woke alone to find
she’d cleaned him out: cash,
cards, car keys, and coke.

His car turned up a week later,
wrecked
beside a cold hill
outside Brunswick, Georgia.

Harvey Goldner