Currency

I felt my irritation lessen, replaced by pity. Like wax replaced by enamel.

So leave: leave under the gun-metal sky at dawn, walk down the gutterways, with the pulsing aureolae of the streetlights marking where the gravity slurs. Share a cigarette with the homeless guy in the park. Take the change out of my pocket and plant the pennies with him, so they'll grow into money trees.

Someone gave me two Martin Van Buren dollars as change, yesterday. They weren't gold colored exactly. They were a joyful color I'd never quite seen before: paler and brighter than gold. Ah, this, I thought -- now this, this was currency.

---

Blood Draw, Thursday, 8:45 AM

Look at the sky blue of the elastic band, leaping
in the flourescent light. Look at the pinkness
of your morning face. Look at the needle's end,
fucking my skin, looking for a warm arteriole
to open and accept it. Look at the scarlet
spilling into the tube!

(And later look at the one red dot
on the white gauze, a Japanese banner:
look at the purple bruising, like river silt,
upriver from the mouth.)

This blood, flowing from dark to light,
flowed from my mother to me, in the womb;
hers from her mother's, and hers from
the first blue-eyed freak, and hers
from the mother of us all in Kenya,
one stream of blood, only one,
in all those millennia, one river of blood,
yours and mine.

Don't stop that tube now, in the light.
Strip off your latex gloves. Pour my blood
over your face, let it stain your blouse,
rub it into your chest and hair, shake like a wet dog
and spatter drops over all the walls: my blood,
your blood, the blood of us all:
this one river of delight, this one
ache of living.