Ode to Women

Poets, rush the last lines
Of your odes to women:
There are strangers on the street
Who won’t rip you apart.
Leaves kiss whispered dewdrops
Unrealized in the wilderness,
And dogs whine waiting to be loved.
Women arrive to introduce diseases
And then dangle the cure—
Those missing pages,
Those beautiful vultures.
There have been men, honest,
Who looked at that door
And refused to enter, preferring
To protest the mad instinct,
To burn like Buddhist monks
In the fire of the unwanted desire,
Laughing in the flames.
So christen this crisis the last;
Bells toll the tide’s approach,
And your clocks are out on the sand.