The Taste of Blood

Taste of Blood

Standing over a family of four, ready to take their dinner order, and all I can taste is iron and blood.  I think I'm in the clear, then I tilt my head forward and blood pours out...none hit their table, my hand caught it.  I apologize and retreat to the bathroom...I plug the hole in my face, tilt my head back and wonder how much more blood I can swallow before I vomit.  By now I figure I'm a half pint down, but who can be sure?  Immediately I'm back in that shower in Baghdad...less than a month into my deployment and my nose is bleeding into the drain...the constant black smoke billows into the heavens and we just keep our eyes on our mission.  Trash, munitions, toxic waste...it ALL gets burned...straight into the air we breathe, no one bats an eye.  I wonder about our drinking water in those plastic bottles...basking in the desert sun like a washed up movie star working on their tan.  If the air does this to my nose, what is the water doing to my body?  Those that don't believe in time travel are the lucky ones...in a moment I'm transported from a restaurant dinning room right back to the battlefield...a battlefield turfed in lies and greed, populated by the children of the expendable class and irrigated by the blood of countless innocents.  I'm tasting the blood of those innocent families, the iron spears of the war machine are now manifest and amplified, inescapable and ever present.  War ALWAYS produces two things..profit and cost...those that profit never bear the cost...that bill gets paid by the rest of us...the disposable...

2 Kings 20:5

"I have heard your prayers and seen your tears; I WILL heal you."