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.