Roadkill Poem Look there on the side of the road! (Please choose one or more adjectives) A bloated, pancaked, bashed to bits, squished, maggot ridden, rotten, stinky, poor, little (please choose one or, if it has been a particularly tragic night in the animal kingdom, more nouns) squirrel, opossum, woodchuck, rabbit, deer, songbird, seagull, turtle! How sad! Look there on the side of the road! A dead racoon, muskrat, fox! How sad! Sad? Bullshit... My grandfather saw dollar signs and fur coats. The pelts stretched and drying before the sun set. Roadkilled deer was free meat. And it beat freezing feet, trudging shotgun woods in howling, snowing Decembers. The Lawd provides in mysterious ways! Look there on the side of the road! A hippopotamus killed in a collision with a unicycle! How sad! And now...a short, bitter, elegiac lament. Please place the back of your hand across your forehead like a swooning silent film star as you read this: Woe! O woe! O woe! See there on the side of the road cute, furry, fuzzy, lovable Mother Nature crushed beneath Man's tyrrany of rubber, asphalt, progress, technology and suburban sprawl. How sad! Is it wrong to laugh about roadkill? Probably, but until these poets jilt their cars and take to their feet or until one of their readers actually plies the byways less frequently for the express purpose of saving critters, I reserve the right to laugh. Not so much about roadkill, but about the folly of roadkill poetry. Ladies and gentlemen, yes, while it's true, the world is trending toward abject fear, terror and chaos. Here's a poem about dead bunnies on the road. Idiots. Anyway... I have now fulfilled requirement 37A toward my inclusion in the pantheon of modern, American poet. Now...to write a poem about 9/11.