ah blood

Operatic actors offstage fashioned masks for their performance in a funeral formula.

         “This is not a fucking rehearsal,” directed the director. “Just get to the verb.”

         “Arrive on time, know your lines and wait for the check,” Leo sang as clouds shafted sunlight across mountains.

         Rational, thinking, speaking animals mumbled sounds, words, coalescing consonants, vowels and syllables. Etyms and atoms and axioms of choice.

         The logic of pain met pain’s tolerance, pain’s loss, pain’s memory, and pain’s fascination. The awareness of pain danced, creating itself, developing a heavy lidded dull throbbing sensation with kindness, a specific joy of pain pulsating through exposed jaw nerves sliding along invisible blood red threads you can’t see, dare to see or acknowledge, all minute tentacles of laughter. You know they are there. 

         Roots of pain bellow below the surface of appearances, in cold-hearted tissue. It needs a biopsy. What’s that? A lab techie’s evaluation analysis under a microscope, in a dust free, germ free sterile environment.     

         Tissue in the same sentence after five days of Bursa whiteout blizzards is the perfect moment to sit drinking iced coffee at dusk near a water fountain pen resolving a molar pain issue tissue, having had it yanked out after inserting 3-4 needles filled with antiseptic solutions into pink red gum soft pliable tissue.

Doctor Death massaged tissue preparing it for a needle, a heavy- duty stainless steel syringe cast in Turku, Finland, with a perfect circle for an index finger. The downward thrust of pressure was constant and bewildering. This is what happened and it didn’t take a well trained discerning eye more that a Nano-second after the partial was removed to see the tooth witnessing interior monologues, dialogue, and soliloquies of red stormed flesh dancing with pain - a sickness leaving the body - as Winter Hawk flew free from pain winging one true sentence.

         The old recalcitrant reclusive tooth had to come out. It had served it’s animalistic purpose dancing with food and multiple labia, clicking gum lined oral stories dazzling extreme pleasures of pain with comforts worth nurturing as a heartbeat’s death defying rhythm pulsated, vibrating faster than shadows divorcing themselves in blind love’s labyrinth. In theory.

         Ah, donating blood.

         Traveling is giving. Giving blood gives the gift of life. Experience, a wonderful little teacher nowadays said, Giving blood helps someone who needs it more than you. I have rare A-. I donated yesterday. Turkish medical authorities permitted a donation. The blood mobile bus sat near a busy intersection. I walked past pretzel sellers, cascading water fountains, shit covered statues of frozen WWI soldiers firing rusty iron guns into cobalt skies and climbed on the bloodmobile express.

         A smiling Bulgarian nurse asked health questions in broken English. Another nurse took blood pressure. She attached a tourniquet to a left arm saying, “You have excellent veins.”

         She swabbed a vein and slid the needle in. “Open and close your left hand.” Blood rivers flow.

         Outside tinted windows in a blinding sun immigrant parents gripped children’s hands. Scraggly half-starved men unloaded boxes of fresh red tomatoes from a white truck. Light reflected off sunglasses of cheerless pedestrians. Salvage operation boy teams folded, crushed and loaded cardboard boxes into metal carts. Recycle sales potential.

Sad, oh so seriously affected disordered businessmen carried battered brown briefcases filled with top secrets and nuclear fission material. Suchness is a burden and moral responsibility.