Cookie, one look at you tells us
you are fashion, you are
drugs, you are the art side
of a new canvas. It is not clear

if you are for sale or have been sold;
maybe you are self-possessed and 
not available except as display but
we all want as much of you

as we can get. That is how
downtown cookie crumbles:
do it for themselves, do it out of need
or for need-cobbled reasons; then

one of us grabs that unique skin, 
puts it on, wears it to cafe, cabaret, 
club, company store, the better end
of the street map, and that’s that.

Cookie, downtown cookie, we are know
you get left behind but you’ve done it before:
reinvent, come back as new fashion,
new drugs, newly living art.  Come back 

and see us sometime — or better yet,
we’ll come back downtown when it’s safer,
when we need an appropriately downtown skin
to perk us up; when downtown’s less you, and more us.