This is another one of those--
along the lines of anti-love poems,
and certainly a poem along the lines of the theme of genocide,
In.
A kind of way.
I consider this poem a feminist poem,
in a disturbing kind of way.
I'll just read it.
It's called "Colorado Boulevard."
"I wanted to die, so I walked the streets.
Dead night, black as iris, cold as the toes on a barefoot
drunk.
Not a sound but my shoes asking themselves over,
what season is this?
Why is the wind stuttering in its stall of nightmares?
Why courage or the bravery of dripping steel?
Given branches, rooted to their cunning, a kind of snow
lay fallow upon the hearth of dried-up trunks, wan
and musing, like an absent guitarist strumming wildly
what she's forgotten most.
Bats fell about me like fire, or dead bark from my brow-beaten
autumn--
a kind of passing through.
And when it called, the startled bird of my birth,
I left it singing, or fallen from its nest.
It was silent as the caves of my footfalls
left written in their absent burials.
What good was this?
My cold hearing, nothing, more desire than protection.
When would it come?
In that clove of cottonwood, perhaps?
That shape in the mist, secret as teeming lions.
Is it my own will that stalks me?
Is it in the slowed heart of my beatings, or the face that
mists when I least expect it?
Frost covered the windshields of the left-behind autos.
In his parking lot, my savior rests,
lighting his crack pipe, semi-automatic
poised at my nipple, or the ear I
expose to witches and thieves.
Here it is.
Will you kill for it."