The Serene and Indifferent: Criticizing the Majority through Otero’s “Nobility of Blood” and Fury’s Kissing Doesn’t Kill
At first glance, the poem “Nobility of Blood” by Manuel Ramos Otero appears to be an intimate prayer to the Lord. However, a significant conundrum of this poem is the true identity of the person or being to whom the speaker of the poem is addressing. The speaker addresses “Lord” in the first line by saying, “Thank you, Lord,” but this only scratches the surface of the puzzle. When Otero writes, “Lord, all that’s left is to deal with the matter of your identity” in the last stanza, he explicitly highlights this underlying issue. Although the speaker of the poem continues to address his or her audience as “Lord,” one can clearly…show more content… This piece of art breaks down barriers and makes the AIDS disease universal, spanning all categories of people. This piece of artwork, in its angry tone, chastises other people’s misguided views on the issues surrounding the AIDS disease, forcing many a random passerby a degree of discomfort in seeing these large displays of intimacy. Analyzing the poem “Nobility of Blood” by Manuel Ramos Otero in light of the piece of artwork “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” by Gran Fury, it becomes clear that the speaker of the poem is in fact addressing the public and its sometimes misguided views regarding the AIDS…show more content… The very first line of the poem, for example, states, “Thank you, Lord, for having send us AIDS.” Right from the beginning, the speaker makes peculiar comments such as this that suggests an overall controversial tone. In the very next line, the speaker uses derogatory terms like “junkies” and “faggots” to describe certain demographics of people who reside in New York. Those terms are highly inflammatory, and most readers of the poem would be taken aback by such use of language. In addition, the speaker uses the phrase “sweet incision of your sword of flesh,” in which case “your” refers to the Lord, and “sword of flesh” is easily interpreted as phallic. Such a connection between the Lord and a phallic image would certainly be controversial to many readers. Building off the controversial lines of a sexual nature previously noted, the speaker also hints at the Lord’s possible “sexual frustration with the Apostles,” another quite inflammatory remark about God’s sexual