About a Bee.

There was a dead bee on the subway this morning.
A tiny little corpse on the center seat,
with its microscopic legs in the air.

Normally I run from bees.
But I sat down next to it and wondered how he got there.
And I wondered how the bee took the F train during rush hour.

(before work. before morning coffee. before the newspaper. before we ctl+alt+del into our hourly identities.)

Maybe the bee was a stowaway,
temporarily affixed to someone’s backpack

Maybe he took all the wrong trains instead of the right ones,
and just gave up.

Maybe he was simply tired of flying and laid down for a rest,
only to break down.

But you can’t ask a dead thing where it went wrong
Or what it could have done differently.
Or what you could have done to help.

So I got up and went to work.