The Price of Blood

What is the cost of blood?
Simply...the cost of life.
But what is the cost of life?
Simply...the wage of death.
But what is the cost of death?
Simply...priceless.

There are some things money can’t buy;
Far less return
Like a little girl’s dignity stripped
Off the face of her soul when daddy injected her...
Molested her...
Imprisoned her...
Profaned her...
Defiled her...

Or the rustling echoes of rusted hours
Slipped so neatly between vacuous moments when you
Once thought you knew who you were, say
From then till now you’ve changed
Better or for worse your outlook
Your dreams
Your vision
Your soul
It’s all rust when you’ve lost it, then
Cash be futile here.

Master Card has nothing on this one...simply
Who can purchase life with pennies, saved
Or worse, hoarded?
Say, the earning of life by sweat over brow?
Falsehood!
To purchase life is to have purchased divinity
Or to have at best conceived either as possible
Spent soul searching litany of wastelands
To have...
Built your ego of bronze and fine gold
For worship, say, to have purchased yourself
From yourself
Thus becoming the irony of your own slave
Trade yourself in repayment for silver
And have lost in loss
Like rich man’s bid to back-purchase entry
Through fierce and threatening needle’s eye...
Better the camel whose humps amass in graces
Stored forgiveness
Pent up piety
Grossed uprightness
In wait of drought or guava seasonalities.
There are many gods
To which you may offer your debt
By your death...
But solely one God
In whom your death is transfigured to resemble naught
Of what it was before you began living within
Him
And His blood
You drank in thirst of cancelling who you were...
Drunkard
Prostitute
Adulterer
Murderer
Thief...
Sinner born of Eve’s ungodly womb
To re-create, or translate your death into His grace
To life, unscathed, of purity nestled deep into Eden’s Earth
Flowing from the reverent sanctity of her offspring
Of Euphrates meandering courses round foliage
Of Tigris enveloping tree of rooted knowledge
Of life giving itself back to Adam’s rib
Back to flooding breath back to lungs
Back to undone...agonies of unsteady childbirth
Reversed transfusion of His blood into ours
To His plasma pouring and gouging out vessels
Pooled mercies into still venous caverns
And death making backstroke to back-course timelines
Giving back life into red marrowed bones
Ad infinitum, bounty beyond my purchase
In awe transcending crucified image of He
Of bleeding skull and sides and wrist
Of dying He withholding my debt...
To risen He who restoreth life
Not of my earning, but of His within me
Ad infinitum; forever am I in debt to His love
Forever am I in death to His love...
Ad infinitum; death into His precious blood
That my life into His love...
Be measured in pints.