How Dr. Colossus’s “Space Coyote” opened the floodgates.
I Don’t Have Enough Blood to Bleed
Sometimes a song gives my thoughts somewhere to go.
I was listening to “Space Coyote” by Dr. Colossus when a little modern-world tension started finding its own words. Certain songs do that to me. A really solid groove, a melody with something to hold onto, and suddenly I’m putting words into the spaces. One phrase arrives, another catches its rhythm, and before long there’s a poem coming out of my mouth.
If you’re poetic, perhaps you know the feeling. At least, that’s the way it works for me.
The music keeps moving, and I can move with it. I don’t have to stop at every line and ask whether it belongs. I can follow the sound long enough to find out what I’ve been carrying.
This time, what came out was the feeling of being ground down. Mundane mentalities and their principalities. Red tape. The demand to become everything, acquire everything, endure everything—and somehow still have enough of yourself left to enjoy it.
Then there’s the uncomfortable question underneath all that fighting: if the fight is all I have, who am I when I am free?
That question caught me in my own poem.
The words came impulsively. Afterward came the polish: finding the breaths, tightening the lines, keeping the rough edges that were doing something useful. I wanted to preserve the tension that brought them out.
The image followed: somebody bound to a giant spiked screw in a black ocean, looking into a lightning storm and crying blood-red tears. A ridiculous piece of machinery to be stranded on. A fairly recognizable feeling.
Dr. Colossus supplied the song that set this in motion. What follows is my own poetic response—the storm it stirred loose.
I Don’t Have Enough Blood to Bleed
I don’t have enough blood to bleed
when this life’s torture is disintegrating me.
Mundane mentalities,
with their principalities,
demand salute;
red tape is strangling me.
The grinding and grating of existence
is making fine powder of me.
And I don’t have enough blood to bleed
when this reality keeps torturing me.
They say the only way to be
is to have everything.
But when I have everything,
what will be left of me?
If the fight is all I have,
who am I when I am free?
I don’t have enough blood to bleed
when this life’s torture is disintegrating me.
Can your eyes still echo
a time when we were alive?
A time when we were dying,
but still had something left to try?
A time we could strive
to be someone—
without becoming everything?
Because I just want to be me.
And I don’t want to shred
just to stay the same.
Can you believe me?
You can torture me.
You can shame me.
You can wear away my name.
I am still the beginning.
I am me beneath the shame.
And I don’t have enough to believe in
when this world keeps grinding me—
grinding and grading,
a circular blade
of stainless static,
a pulsating shame.
I just want to be me.
I don’t have enough blood to bleed
when this life’s torture is disintegrating me.
The song that opened the floodgates: “Space Coyote” by Dr. Colossus.
Put it on. See what words come looking for you.
