Interpreting: Poem Analysis

“LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! the crowd sings in the streets.”(23-24) Why would there be people singing in the streets? Is it a protest? If so, what are they protesting? Are they simply proclaiming love to the world because they feel so strongly about it? Interpreting, first of all, is that there is a whole sense of what love is, and what is not. Love, that is what the crowds are singing about. The woman in the poem yells about love and he is dissatisfied “But after she leaves/I feel odd.”(17-18) Something about this love did not feel right, but the gun has its own sense: “I lock the door,/go to the desk and take the pistol/from the drawer. it has its own sense of love.”(19-21) Directly following this line is the line about the crowd singing “LOVE LOVE LOVE” (23) and the first shooting, and in rejection of the idea of love that they are singing about, he shoots and fires. 3 people have been shot from the shooting, but the crowd envisions him
The crowd rejects both these ideas of course - locking of doors, and weapons. The writer is not a flower. There are no indications anywhere that the writer considers himself to be one of these people, as his sense of truth is that which the crowd rejects, and he never goes out to them, he shoots, he yells, then returns to his kitchen. He is not one of their innocents, not one of their undefended types. He is not them. He is not a flower. This is again evidenced when he uses both bullets and then, I sit and listen to them singing I sit and listen to them. Because they, the flowers, are a “them”. He is not a part.The last thing to feel is relevant to say at the moment is that at the beginning, he hears the crowd. He first acknowledges them, then joins a part of them in brief , then confronts them with the gun but at the end, he is doing more than that - he is listening. Really