Better than Blood

Questions.
A needle.
“A little sting” she says
and this time, she is right.

Blood flows freely
into bags, carefully weighed
by the scale.
I am the perfect laboratory rat
until I say

“I miss your blue hair”
and she looks at me for the first time,
suddenly a person,
and I can tell from her eyes,
opening just a notch
that she remembers that day

years ago, in another anonymous town,
the same questions,
new needles
and her freshly blued hair

When, all pent up like a dam near overflowing
her life’s story poured out in a waterfall,
fleeing home, so close to your own,
never fitting in,
never feeling enough, and the of love,
new and fresh.

I ask her about her wife:
“It would be about a year now.” I say
and she gushes anew
her whole new life something miraculous.

“I no longer need a disguise.” she tells me.
“I am good enough.”

And she is. The blue is gone. The piercings too
are gone. All that is left is the person,
the real person, that I met once before.
Less colorful. More true.

The blood is done.
The bag is full.
The needle pulled out.
I can smell the iodine
as she cleans my arm.

We hug and the room stares.
No matter.
I leave behind my donation,
not just a pint of life teeming red fluid
but the simple gift
or remembering.

About this poem

This was the other part of my day yesterday, same place and time as yesterday’s post, but a whole different kind of adventure. It was going to be another essay, but somehow, it turned into a poem.

Tom