Orange Blood
The streets of San Francisco
are littered with bodies
of bank robbers & mobsters
prostitutes & pimps
Bullet holes in foreheads
Clothes covered
with that fake orange blood
they used in the seventies
Just pretend dead
No sirens (those will be dubbed in later)
Camera pans
an immaculate city
Mid-morning weekday
only a few tourists about
(everyone else is at work)
Light traffic on bridges
Newly erected Pyramid
dominates the scene
Sky
Maya blue
perpetually wiped clean
by low-flying clouds
Come nightfall
even the junkies
in the Haight
& strippers in North Beach
will have a kind of innocence
Just extras on the set
As close to Utopia
as you could get
in 1973
& now only attainable
in a Dirty Harry movie
Copyright Credit: David Trinidad, "Orange Blood." Copyright © 2016 by David Trinidad. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network.
Source: PoetryNow (2016)