Bloody Footprints
the movie opens
on a busy sidewalk
someone with a knife
stabs a stranger
keeps on going
while the victim collapses
remember the knife
the flash of it
the thrust
blood blood blood
people stepping in it
as they step over the body
on their important way
bloody foot prints
quickly splotching the sidewalk
as the camera
pulls up up
the police arrive
the credits roll
over the expanding trail
of bloody foot prints
steps lead to smart shops
to offices
into elevators
down marble corridors
over carpets in hotel hallways
cafe floors
washroom stalls
blood gets on hands
trying to clean shoes
the fingerprints on mirrors
coffee cups
documents
dried flakes fall between
keyboard keys
smear smart phones
traces tracked undetected through
airport screening machines
splotches on luggage
the blood travels around the world
the sidewalk
with the outline of the body
is a pool of blood
after crime scene photos have been taken
after cellphone photos have hit the net
city works come to clean it up
the camera looks for the stabber
pushing through crowds
roving over heads shoulders
no faces
hands washing
blood pooling in sinks
almost dripping down the walls
of apartments
seeping out of TV screens
bloody footprints
lead up to a door
the bell rings
you reach to open the door
the closing credits roll
This piece is based on a real movie but I can only recall this opening sequence of the stabbing and the falling to the ground. I’m not sure if it didn’t happen as they were crossing a downtown street, rather than just walking down a street – people jostling in opposite directions. A car horn honking while another car drove around the body with a close up of the irritated driver’s face. All before the opening credits come up.
That’s all I remember of the movie. I have no idea who the cast is, what the music was like. The time area was early 80’s. The plot was, gasp, a killer targeting random people one of whom was his actual victim. American – probably United Artists – a studio that specialized in this sort of thing. Bumbling police with one detective needed to redeem his reputation by solving this case – which he does.
The rest of the piece after the first verse is my imagined plot. Some based on when I watched shows like CSI, some based on the real indifference people have been shown to show when violence happens – avoiding involvement. The blood becomes a symbol for the emotional effects of the killing. Those traces that remain, sometimes for decades, when someone witnesses say a car crash.
It becomes a list poem of where those blood traces travel, of some of the ways crime is treated now with cell-phone pics as we rush passed. The only difference her his that there are no reports asking people ‘how did they feel?’ But the movie camera keeps up the search. It is the detective following the clues. 
The poem ends in a way no movie can end – here you, the reader, get pulled into the both the poem and the movie. Sure the ending is a bit of a literary conceit and at the same implicates us in the crime in a fun way – what do we walk away from when shouldn’t.
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