There Will Be Blood Tonight--Poem on the Los Angeles Holy

This is their city and they will fight. 

They are angels fallen through discipline 

and the dusky streets, the women behind their crimson shades, 

the three-legged dog running blind, 

know all there is and all there will be: 

there will be Blood tonight.

The postcard in the window, 

bent with dishonesty, 

by the emblem of it’s hazy red sun says hesitantly: 

“Welcome,” followed 

more assuredly by, “To Los Angeles.” 

Outside, the clerk, the man 

with native hands holds the back of his head 

to keep it.

The gun he knows, by the weight at his skull, 

bears its busy lead.

He thinks that the alley 

smells like apples 

while he falls two feet;

the ground he meets feels hard like concrete fate.

Now all he sees is a starry belt, 

and five pointed seconds of breathing go by,

below the silhouetted man who will take his life. 

Street light halos wander into sight; 

He hears the bark of a rabid dog and curses it for being alive. 

“There will be wine, and their will be bread, the body and blood, for all, tonight,”

Says the stiff collared preacher, miles away, 

encircled with wood, 

his cedared protection 

from nightmares in which death could feel. 

There are miles and suburbs, 

there is violet trimmed procrastination still,

between him and alley way sympathy. 

Yet, the small pink girl in the frontward pew

muddles thoughts in her head about the living and the dead, 

why she is eating the God she loves.

Before she can part her berry lips to ask, 

she drops on her knees and cool metal presses her chin.

The gold-flecked rim

Makes a hill in her rosy vision 

of a canvas waist covered in rags. 

The man in black that is tipping her head, melds within it,

wearing a painted crown of thorns.

She watches her father in his permanent pleats, his American tie, 

praying that she'll drink it the same. 

But it winds down her neck, 

Blooming red grapes on her white dress.

A terror blooms there as well, that her father 

will turn his face from the framing light, 

look down, and in gruff whispers, 

Exile her from the innards 

of this thing they called the “fruitful” life.

He smiles at her 

with his chin stained dark, 

While the mouthing pulpit 

yawns the peaceful words:

“Now you have eaten of the body, and drank of the blood, tonight be filled with love”