Blood Donor
Give it up
in pints and puddles,
spurting around the nails
piercing your open palms,
or the thick spikes in your feet,
or the femoral artery
in the groin of the many-faced soldier
who stepped on a roadside bomb
in a muddy ditch in Kandahar,
or the severed thumb that lost
its conflict with the Skil-Saw blade,
or the Collie’s severed ear
after he jumped without hesitation
into a pack of California coyotes
devouring his master’s tabby,
or the Hispanic gang member
lying in an ER in Chino
with three Glock caps in his butt,
or the 18 year old blonde cheerleader
who stuck her face through the windshield
of her boyfriend’s ’70 Camero,
or the firefighter giving liquid-life for
his fallen and burned comrade,
or Joe Citizen who annually makes his trek
to the Red Cross to give up hot hemoglobin,
or the nose bleed that will not clot;
our wounded economy,
our fractured freedom,
our lacerated liberty,
our precious privacy;
all impaled on the sharp stilettos
of hooded fascist politicos—
even our rights of expression, even
our poetry.
No, goddamn it, no.
You don’t have to take out poetry—
we give it freely.
Glenn Buttkus March 2010
2 comments:
This is really good. One of your best. Are the firefighter and Joe Citizen giving blood or do they need blood?
Peter
Glen (Blood Donor): I like poems that begin in once place and end up somewhere totally different. I like the suprise of them. The list of characters who are 'blood donors', in one way or another, is vivid, and I think the poem is stronger when it focuses on specific individuals rather than generalisations (e.g. the opening few lines). For me, the transition from the 'nosebleed' to the next directly stated comments isn't convincing enough. Perhaps it's too abrupt? Perhaps I can't tie in the grammatical sense of the opening exhortation 'Give it up' to these lines? And once again, the shift to the idea of poetry is rather abrupt, and I'm struggling to draw connections between the outpouring of poetry and, e.g. the death of a the soldier, or some of the other images in that section.
But this is a strong draft, and the poem is here. I just think it needs to be more focused and edited to let a primary theme emerge.
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