Universal Donor

The cuff is tight on my upper arm
and as I clench my fist,
my vein lifts blue and bulging
to offer what I have to share.
The needle prick, a sudden sharp intrusion,
drops me into dizziness.
I sink with immediate lightheaded,
visceral response to an open vein.
My life pours down a plastic tube
into a sealed pouch rocking in its cradle.

I see my puce purple liquid pulse
slosh in the bag and know
it is only a small part of me,
one eighth what my body metabolizes every day
from food, and breath, and being.
What lights my eyes and whispers with my soul
oxygenates in my lungs, and forced
by steady heart compressions
through my miles of capillaries,
gushes out in little jets
to make a nicely packaged gift
to fill another's veins.
Each corpuscle encapsulates
my unique identity until in sharing
I become universal.
Another needle stick and gravity's flow
conjoins my strength
to another's fading body.

I do not know when I look at the faces

of those who walk the streets around me
which ones teetered on death's edge
until a paramedic on the scene
delivered my transfusions.
My one pint may give
a holiday from oncology,
a neonate survival in its incubator womb,
or sew hope into bullet torn flesh.
I recline on the faux leather chair,
my arm extended and inner elbow exposed
in a prolonged offertory gesture.
I lose only time in the process
of buying time to heal.

It is a small thing for me to do
on a Saturday afternoon
to send my cells on a journey
into a lifepool of beating hearts
and in that swim
erase the thought boundaries
of who I am and who I am not.