Bitter Blood
This is a prayer, rather a confession of good burning in a cesspool, of my Life and its tragic counterparts; I was raised without religion, only to choose my first Christian Baptism, I am a follower of Jesus, and yes I have taken my painful cross up with him, I have testified in the streets, begged for food in the hotels if the infamously poor, bereaved of Spirit, my eyes wanton for a female moon I have tortured flies in a filed ray of Sun, and waited for the rain to wash away their battered wings; only if my mother and father could understand that poverty to me it was some kind of rebellion, I listened to the smoke of people whispering behind my back, and I traveled to the Cities of brilliance only to be forced into some cage, some hidden jail of sacrifice; last year around my Birthday I was locked up in a Mental Asylum, I was conservatized and given and given drugs to sink brainless in angry sleep, and I ate the food served to me, the dark stew that stirred ugly in my guts, all because I loved a little girl, her eyes were my delight after the pain and torture of being in my prison for so long, to see something so lovely, like a poem starved for wind; she filled my sails with the blue clay of night's quiet awakening, and now inside the hospital I celebrate bitter blood, with both pathos and bathos I turn by eyes against the heaven of the sky and wonder if I shall leave tomorrow, yes, it is all set, tomorrow I'm out the door, the little girl is a forbidden verdict of the court, and I am being watched all the time, but still to dream of freedom, to sail once again against the wind, to ride my bicycle up a mouth of mysterious air, and down the nose of purple sidewalks, while the bitter blood inside me still burns, though in sweetness I wonder what will become of me who has paid dearly for the sacrament, who has hidden in clear upheaval of time. With goodness as his Master, not chance, no! But the satisfied heart that grows still in the winter, a frozen socket of dust and water, only to be forgotten by the chance with something of freedom beating itself back to birth with its bitter blood stretched in wonder for the mysterious and secret World that died with its reckoning evil on a Cross that no Man created.
Reprinted by kind permission of the Regents of the University of California,
Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Gift of Diane Walker Murray