donate blood

Namaste,

You follow the 39 steps through blood bank doors. You fill out forms answering 20 questions on the donor consent form, such as:

1. Are you in good health today?

2. Do you have an infection now, or are you taking antibiotics now?

3. Since the age of 11, have you had yellow jaundice, liver disease, or hepatitis?

4. Have you ever tested positive for hepatitis?

5. Have you ever used a needle, even once, to take any drugs?

6. In the past three years, have you lived outside of the U.S., except Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan or Western Europe?

7. In the past 12 months have you traveled?

8. In the past 12 months have you received a blood transfusion?

9. In the past 12 months have you had a tattoo, ear or body piercing, acupuncture, accidental needle stick, or come into contact with someone else’s blood, or snorted cocaine or any street drug?

10. In the past 12 months have you ever had sex, even once, with anyone who has ever used a needle for non-prescription drugs?

11. In the past 12 months, have you had sex, even once, with anyone who has taken money or drugs in exchange for sex?

12. In the past 12 months, have you given money or drugs to anyone to have sex with you?

13. In the past 12 months, have you had sex, even once, with anyone who has had AIDS or tested positive for the AIDS virus?

14. Are you a female who, in the past 12 months, has had sex with a male who has had sex, even once, with another male?

15. Were you born in, or have you lived in, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria?

16. Have you had sex with anyone who was born or lived in any of these countries?

17. Have you been injected with bovine beef insulin?

18. Have you ever had a bleeding problem?

19. Are you a female who has had two or more pregnancies? 

20. Have you or any blood relative ever had a dura mater or brain covering transplant during head or brain surgery?

The questions are endless.

Finished circling N answers and doodling in margins, you agree and understand your blood and plasma will be tested for the AIDS virus and other diseases and if there is a risk your blood will not be used and you will be notified and you understand the answers are truthful and to the best of your knowledge and you sign the form and sit in a comfortable deep brown chair watching donors thumb old magazines, devour recipes and eye candy.

Your name is called. Outside plate glass in August haze shadow hills full of dense dark evergreens in hot sunshine beam down white blast furnaces magnifying brilliance.

Nurses pull air conditioned nightmare identity theory cards from files peopled with conversations and delight a slight acquaintance. Take a seat as a smiling nurse pricks your finger with a thorn asking thermometer questions, checking arms for signs of Needles, a California desert town.

You sign more forms you witness you provide credentials you slide into a main room where volunteers direct you to a reclining seat asking which arm left arm you say as she tightens the belt around your arm conditioning blood pressure pump as she swabs down arm holding needle veins out handing you a styrofoam ball telling you to squeeze every three seconds as a machine ticks off down below out of sight out of mind as your blood rocks back and forth inside a new time measurement piece measuring platelets.

You drink lemonade squeeze release squeeze release when machine stops she takes the pressure off takes the ball gone tape off needle out gauze band aid arm up for three minutes drink lemonade make small talk blood in plastic bag dark red liquid sealed documented evidence with bar coded lot number you get off table walk down a hall receiving a key chain after 100 donations.

You sit in shade looking at a universal key chain environment.

This implies you need to find keys, alphabets, script, bones, dust and calibrated songs of ghost dances for the space-time chain.

Two months later you will do it all over again with joy. Your blood goes to any Childlighter child with A negative. One in 16 (6.3%) with statistics, there are lies, damn lies and statistics not knowing who, just knowing  someone out there young and alive lives with your small anonymous gift of red language.

Metta.

practice smiling

Namaste,

act of writing
touches minute pressure
dances on clean white virgin parchment

distracted clear focused voices
inside a seed of consciousness
bridging knowledge and imagination
between two crutches
feeling pressure under arms
hands on handles
support lightness

someone eases my voice
a reading one, a listening one, a writing one
glowing ink
chiseling paper

an arrow of impatience 
channels beauty's awkward shyness
this seed of day
blind sensations 
missing limbs speak their eternal loss

Metta.

The Midnight Court

I entertained visitors, fished the Glen Malure river in complete solitude, peeled potatoes and carrots for stews, painted watercolors, discussed road adventures with vagabonds, wrote and played chess by firelight. 

Pawn takes pawn as players attempt to control the middle of the board attacking and defending positions simultaneously. It was about position and material. We made the necessary sacrifices after the beginning game through the middle game to the end game. 

Andy, a German visitor said India was once lost in a chess game between two kings. We played in the dark of night illuminated by fireplace light as peat fires roared their way up the flue. Quick moving violent storms pummeled the place.

“That’s a dangerous move,” he said as my knight escaped a pin.

“Yes, but it’s elegant.”

“We destroy ourselves eventually.”

“Yes, as long as we enjoy the process. Your move.”

In the morning Susan related a dream from literature she was reading, by Brian Merriman, a merry man while doing her nails near the river.

“Have you heard about The Midnight Court?” 

“No,” someone said. “Tell us.”

“It’s about a fellow who falls asleep and has a dream where he is taken before a court of women who condemn him to be punished for all the men in their knowledge. How women should have the right to marriage and sex but often meet with disappointment and rejection by men who could easily have become their lovers and husbands.” 

Affected

"Keep your hand moving," whispered the writing teacher to 80 robots. 

The foreign teacher wearing Tang Dynasty clothing filled with dragons, yin-yang balance, a Phoenix rising, a crying crane flying through mist covered mountains while emperors danced with concubines inside Forbidden Cities' red lacquered emotional curiosities where visions of detached ebullient phosphorus streams dove into silence beside abstractions of zither tonal quality in extreme bliss was a manifestation of phenomenal superior detective analysis and forty questions of the soul marking marketing examinations at 7:00 p.m. followed by utter exhaustion.

We escaped the sterile Chinese university on mountain bikes, singing, “We know so much and understand so little.”  

“People are more affected by how they feel than by what they understand,” bright star Leo said. “On day one my teacher said, ‘I only want you to bring two things to class. Your ears.’”

We sharpened sticks on stones carving paleo-Leo-lithic cave paintings on soft clay walls. Leo edged circles, rectangles, triangles, curves, lines and dots. He carved his name backwards for future historians and archeologists to get the gist or, as an unemployed academic financial analyst on Wall Street would, could, should declare, “English On Line.”

Being hunters-gathers we salvaged assorted garbage mired in mud. We created a semi-permanent temporary recycled art project on the canyon bottom. 

We assembled statues using sticks, soggy faded purple underwear, a filtered worker’s mask with a broken elastic strap, beer bottles, soda cans, green string, cigarette packages, lost feathers, sharp needled pine cones, coral blue seashells, orange peels, melted candles, dried condoms, fractured leaves, bird calls and worn and torn useful Lung-Tao prayer flags from Lhasa, Tibet.

In nature they drilled for cauliflower.

T.S. Elliot Prize

Greetings,

Brian Turner is one of ten major poets shortlisted for the T.S. Elliot Prize on January 23rd and 24th. Readings will be held at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Brian's recent book, Phantom Noise, was published last April by Alice James Books. It continues his poetic journey begun with Here Bullet about his time and experiences in Iraq. 

We met by chance in Cambodia last February on a boat exploring a floating village. Delightful. 

Poetry Book Society 

Metta.