Mercy

much o f a house as any other house. I thought about walls

pretty much all the time. Y ou should be able to just put up

walls, it should be possible. There’s literally no end to the

places walls could go without inconveniencing anyone, except

they would have to walk around. They say a ro of over your

head but it’s walls really that are the issue; you can just think

about them, all their corners touching or all lined up thin like

pancakes, painted a pretty color, a light color because you

don’t want it to look too small, or you can make it more than

one color but you run the risk o f looking busy, somewhat

vulgar, and you don’t want it to look gray or brown like

outside or you could get sad. There’s got to be some place in

heaven where God stores walls, there’s just walls, stacked or

standing up straight like the pages o f a book, miles high and

miles wide running in pale colors above the clouds, a storage

place, and God sees someone lost and He just sends them

down four at a time. Guess He don’t. There’s people take them

for granted and people who dream about them— literally,

dream how nice they would be, pretty and painted, serene. I

w ouldn’t mind living outside all the time if it didn’t get cold or

wet and there wasn’t men. A ro o f over your head is more

conceptual in a sense; it’s sort o f an advanced idea. In life you

can cover your head with a piece o f w ood or with cardboard or

newspapers or a side o f a crate you pull apart, but walls aren’t

really spontaneous in any sense; they need to be built, with

purpose, with intention. Someone has to plan it if you want

them to come together the right w ay, the whole four o f them

with edges so delicate, it has to be balanced and solid and

upright and it’s very delicate because if it’s not right it falls,

you can’t take it for granted; and there’s wind that can knock it

down; and you will feel sad, remorseful, you will feel full o f

grief. Y ou can’t sustain the loss. A ro o f over your head is a sort

o f suburban idea, I think; like that i f you have some long, flat,

big house with furniture in it that’s all matching you surely

also will have a ro o f so they make it a synonym for all the rest

but it’s walls that make the difference between outside and

not. It’s a well-kept secret, arcane knowledge, a m ystery not

often explained. Y o u don’t see it written down but initiates

know. I type and sometimes I steal but I’m stopping as much

as I can. I live inside now. I have an apartment in a building.

It’s a genuine building, a tenement, which is a famous kind o f

building in which many have lived in history. M aybe not

T rotsky but Em m a Goldm an for certain. I don’t go near men

really. Sometimes I do. I get a certain forgetfulness that comes

on me, a dark shadow over m y brain, I get took up in a certain

feeling, a wandering feeling to run from existence, all restless,

perpetual motion. It drives me with an ache and I go find one. I

get a smile on m y face and m y hips m ove a little back and forth

and I turn into a greedy little fool; I want the glass all em pty. I

grab some change and I hit the cement and I get one. I am

writing a certain very serious book about life itself. I go to bars

for food during happy hours when m y nerves aren’t too bad,

too loaded down with pain, but I keep to m yself so I can’t get

enough to eat because bartenders and managers keep watch

and you are supposed to be there for the men which is w hy

they let you in, there ain’t no such thing as a solitary woman

brooding poetically to be left alone, it don’t happen or she

don’t eat, and mostly I don’t want men so I’m hungry most o f

the time, I’m almost always hungry, I eat potatoes, you can

buy a bag o f potatoes that is almost too heavy to carry and you

can just boil them one at a time and you can eat them and they

fill you up for a while. M y book is a very big book about

existence but I can’t find any plot for it. It’s going to be a very

big book once I get past the initial slow beginning. I want to

get it published but you get afraid you will die before it’s

finished, not after when it can be found and it’s testimony and

then they say you were a great one; you don’t want to die

before you wrote it so you have to learn to sustain your

writing, you take it serious, you do it every day and you don’t

fail to write words down and to think sentences. It's hard to

find words. It’s about some woman but I can’t think o f what

happens. I can say where she is. It’s pretty barren. I always see

a woman on a rock, calling out. But that’s not a story per se.

Y ou could have someone dying o f tuberculosis like Mann or

someone who is suffering— for instance, someone who is

lovesick like Mann. O r there’s best-sellers, all these stories

where women do all these things and say all these things but I

don’t think I can write about that because I only seen it in the

movies. There’s marriage stories but it’s so boring, a couple in

the suburbs and the man on the train becoming unfaithful and

how bored she is because she’s too intelligent or something

about how angry she is but I can’t remember why. A love

story’s so stupid in these modern times. I can’t have it be about

m y life because number one I don’t remember very much and

number two it’s against the rules, you’re supposed to make

things up. The best thing that ever happened to me is these

walls and I don’t think you could turn that into a story per se or

even a novel o f ideas that people would grasp as philosophical:

for instance, that you can just sit and they provide a

fram ework o f dignity because no one’s watching and I have

had too many see too much, they see you when they do things

to you that you don’t want, they look, and the problem is

there’s no walls keeping you sacred; nor that if you stand up

they are solid which makes you seem real too, a real figure in a

room with real walls, a touchstone o f authenticity, a standard

for real existence, you are real or you feel real, you don’t have

to touch them to feel real, you just have to be able to touch

them. M y pacifist friend gave me money to live here. She saw

me on the street one day, I guess, after I didn’t go back to her

apartment no more. She said come with me and she got a

newspaper and she found an apartment and she called the

landlord and she put the money in m y hand and she sent me to

the landlord which scared me because I never met one before, a

real one, but also she wasn’t going to let the cash go elsewhere

which there was a fair chance it would, because I would have

liked some coke or something or some dinner or some drinks

and a m ovie and a book or something more real than being

inside which seemed impossible— it seemed not really available and it seemed impossible to sustain so it made more sense

to me to use the cash for something real that I knew I could get,

something I knew how to use. I started sending her money

back as soon as I got some, I’d put some in an envelope and

mail it back even if it was just five dollars but she said I was

stupid because she only said it was a loan but it w asn’t and I

didn’t need to pay it back and everyone knew that which is my

weakness, how everyone got to know things but I don’t know

them. I can’t think o f any stories about pacifists that aren’t

true. There’s nothing imaginary about walls, or eating,

nothing fictive as it were, but more especially there’s nothing

imaginary about them when they’re missing. M y walls are

thin; yeah I wish they were mine. N othing’s yours. God hurts

you if you think they’re yours. In one second o f a bad thought

you can bring evil down on you. The walls are thin. I dream

there’s holes in them and I get scared as if it’s not really inside.

There’s not much food and I know it ain’t mine in any

meaningful sense. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up, not

just write down true things, or sincere things, or some things

that happened. M y mother who you can’t make up either

because there’s nothing so real as one named me Andrea as if I

was someone: distinct, in particular. She made a fiction. I’m

her book, a made-up story written down on a birth certificate.

Y ou could also say she’s a liar on such a deep level she should

be shot by all that’s fair; deep justice. if I was famous and my

name was published all over the world, in Italy and in Israel

and in Africa and in India, on continents and subcontinents, in

deserts, in ancient cities, it would still be cunt to every fucking

asshole drunk on every street in the world; and to them that’s

not drunk too, the sober ones who say it to you like they’re

calling a dog: fetch, cunt. if I won the Nobel Prize and walked

to the corner for milk it would still be cunt. And when you got

someone inside you who is loving you it’s still cunt and the

ones w ho’d die i f they wasn’t in you, you, you in particular, at

least that night, at least then, that time, that place, to them it’s

still cunt and they whisper it up close and chill the blood that’s

burning in you; and if you love them it’s still cunt and you can

love them so strong you’d die for them and it’s still cunt; and

your heartbeat and his heartbeat can be the same heartbeat and

it’s still cunt. It’s behind your back and it’s to your face; the

ones you know, the ones you don’t. It’s like as i f nigger was a

term o f intimate endearment, not just used in lynching and

insult but whispered in lovemaking, the truth under the truth,

the name under the name, love’s name for you and it’s the

same as what hate calls you; he’s in you whispering nigger. It’s

thugs, it’s citizens, it’s cops, it’s strangers, it’s the ones you

want and the ones you deplore, you ain’t allowed indifference,

you have to decide on a relationship then and there on the spot

because each one that passes pisses on you to let you know he’s

there. There’s some few you made love with and yo u ’re still

breathing tight with them, you can still feel their muscles

swelling through their skin and bearing down on you and you

can still feel their weight on you, an urgent concentration o f

blood and bone, hot muscle, spread over you, the burden o f it

sinking into you, a stone cliff into a wet shore, and yo u ’re still

tangled up in them, good judgm ent aside, and it’s physical, it’s

a physical m em ory, in the body, not just in the brain, barely in

the brain at all, you got their sweat on you as part o f your

sweat and their smell’s part o f your smell and you have an ache

for them that’s deep and gnawing and hurtful in more than

your heart and you still feel as if it’s real and current, now: how

his body moves against you in convulsions that are awesome

like mountains m oving, slow, burdensome, big, and how you

m ove against him as i f you could m ove through him, he’s the

ocean, yo u ’re the tide, and it’s still cunt, he says cunt. H e’s

indelibly in you and you don’t want redemption so much as

you want him and still it’s cunt. It’s w hat’s true; Andrea’s the

lie. It’s a lie we got to tell, Jane and Judith and Ellen and

whom ever. It’s our most desperate lie. M y mother named me

Andrea. It means manhood or courage. It means not-cunt. She

specifically said: not-cunt. This one ain’t cunt, she declared,

after blood spilled and there was the pain o f labor so intense

that God couldn’t live through it and w ouldn’t which is w hy

all the pain’s with us and still she brought herself to a point o f

concentration and she said: not-cunt. This one’s someone, she

probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her,

something. Something. Let her something. D on ’t, not with

this one. Just let this one through. Just don’t do it to this one.

She wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure

defeated her and turned her cold to me, because before I was

even ten some man had wrote “ this one’s cunt, ” he took his

fingers and he wrote it down on me and inside me, his fingers

carved it in me with a pain that stayed half buried and there

wasn’t words I had for what he did, he wrote I was cunt, this

sweet little one who was what’s called a child but a female one

which changes it all. M y mama showed that fiction was

delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to

last past your own lifetime. The man, on the other hand, was a

pragmatist, a maker o f reality, a shaper o f history, an

orchestrator o f events. He used life, not paper, bodies, not ink.

The Nazis, o f course, synthesized the two: bodies and ink.

Y ou can’t even say it would solve the problem to have

numbers on us, inked on. Numbers is as singular as names

unless we are all zero, 0, we could all be 0; Pauline Reage

already suggested it, o f course, but she’s a demagogue and a

utopian, a kind o f Stalinist o f female equality, she wants us all

equal on the bottom o f anything that’s mean enough to be on

top; it has a certain documentary quality. Unlike Reage, my

mother just made it up, and her fiction was a lie, almost

without precedent, not recognized as original or great, a

voyage o f imagination; it was just a fucking lie. I don’t want to

tell lies, not for moral reasons but it’s m y idea o f pride, you

name it, I can take it. I was born in a city where the walls were

falling down; I didn’t see many solid walls. The streets were

right next to you it seemed because you could always hear the

buzz, the hum, the call, as if drums were beckoning you to the

tribal dance; you could see the freedom. Inside was small and

constrained with rules designed to make you some kind o f

trained cockroach and outside was forever, a path straight to

the heart o f the world; there were no limits, it spread out in

front o f you to anywhere, with anyone. Limits were another

lie, a social fiction all the zombies got together to tell. The

destination was always the street because the destination was

always freedom; out from under; no rule on top o f you. Y ou

could almost look through the brick, which was crumbling,

and you had this sense that every building had holes in it, a

transparency, and that no walls were ever finished or ever

lasted; and the cement outside was gray, cracked, streaked

with blood from where they threw you down to have fun with

you on hot nights and cold nights, the boys with their cars and

knives; I knew some o f those boys; I loved Nino who said

“ make love” as if it was something real special and real nice

and so fine, so precious and kind and urgent, his eyes burned

and his voice was low and soft and silk, it wrapped itself

around you, he didn’t reach out, he didn’t m ove towards you,

you had to let him know, you had to; I could still fucking die

for what he promised with his brilliant seduction, a poor,

uneducated boy, but when he did it I got used to being hurt

from behind, he used his knife, he made fine lines o f blood,

delicate, and you didn’t dare m ove except for your ass as he

wanted and you didn’t know if yo u ’d die and you got to love

danger i f you loved the boy and danger never forsakes you; the

boy leaves but danger is faithful. Y ou knew the cement under

you and the brick around you and the sound o f the boys

speeding by in their cars and the sudden silence, which meant

they were stalking you. I was born in Camden down the street

from where Walt Whitman lived, M ickle Street, he was the

great gray poet, the prophetic hero o f oceanic verse; also not-

cunt. Great poet; not-cunt. It’s like a mathematical equation

but no one learns it in school by heart; it ain’t written down

plain on the blackboard. It’s algebra for girls but no one’s

going to teach you. Y ou get brought down or throwed down

and you learn for yourself. There’s no mother on earth can

bear to explain it. I can’t write down what happened and I can’t

tell lies. T here’s no words for what happened and there’s

barely words for the lies. if I was a man I would say something

about fishing and it would be a story, a perfectly fine one too;

the bait, the hook, the lake, the wind, the shore, and then

everything else is the manly stuff. If I was a man at least I’d

know what to say, or I’d say it so grand it wouldn’t matter if it

was true or not; anyone’d recognize it and say it was art. I

could think o f something important, probably; recognizably

so. If I was a man and something happened I could write it

down and probably it would pass as a story even if it was true.

O f course, that’s just speculation. I’d swagger, too, if I was a

man; I’m not proud to say it but I’m sure it’s true. I would take

big steps, loud ones, down the street; I could be the Zen master

o f fuck you. I would spread m yself out and take up all the

space and spread my legs wide open in the subway to take up

three seats with just m y knees like they do. I would be very

bold and very cool. I’d be smarter than I am now, I’m sure,

because what I knew might matter and I’d remember more,

I’m sure. I don’t think I’d go near women though because I

wouldn’t want to hurt them. I know how everything feels. I

think if I was a man m y heart would not hurt so much and I

wouldn’t have this terror I am driven by but cannot name. I

think I could write a poem about it, perhaps. I think it could

probably make a very long poem and I could keep rewriting it

to get every nuance right and chart it as it changed over time;

song o f himself, perhaps, a sequel. Ginsberg says he chased

Whitman through supermarkets; I fucking was him; I

embraced all the generations without distinctions and it failed

because o f this awfulness that there is no name for, this great

meanness at the heart o f what they mean when they stick it in; I

just don’t know a remedy, because it is a sick and hostile thing.

Even if there were no wars I think I could say some

perceptions I had about life, I wouldn’t need the C ivil War or

the Vietnam War to hang m y literary hat on as it were, and I

could be loud, which I would try, I’m sure, I could call

attention to m yself as i f I mattered or what happened did or as

i f I knew something, even about suffering or even about life;

and, frankly, then it might count. I could stop thinking every

minute about where each sound is coming from and where the

shadows are each minute. I can’t even close m y eyes now

frankly but I think it’s because I’m this whatever it is, you can

have sophisticated words for it but the fact is you can be

sleeping inside with everything locked and they get in and do

it to you no matter how bad it hurts. In magazines they say

w om en’s got allure, or so they call it, but it’s more like being

some dumb w riggling thing that God holds out before them

on a stick with a string, a fisher o f men. The allure’s there even

i f you got open sores on you; I know. The formal writing

problem, frankly, is that the bait can’t write the story. The bait

ain’t even barely alive. There’s a weird German tradition that

the fish turned the tables and rewrote the story to punish the

fisherman but you know it’s a lie and it’s some writer o f fiction

being what became known as a modernist but before that was

called outright a smartass; and the fish still ain’t bait unless it’s

eviscerated and bleeding. I just can’t risk it now but if I was a

man I could close m y eyes, I’m sure; at night, I’d close them,

I’m sure. I don’t think m y hands would shake. I don’t think so;

or not so much; or not all the time; or not without reason;

there’s no reason now anyone can see. M y breasts w ouldn’t

bleed as i f God put a sign on me; blessing or curse, it draws

flies. Tears o f blood fall from them; they weep blood for me,

because I’m whatever it is: the girl, as they say politely; the

girl. Y o u ’re supposed to make things up for books but I am

afraid to make things up because in life everything evaporates,

it’s gone in mist, just disappears, there’s no sign left, except on

you, and you are a fucking invisible ghost, they look right

through you, you can have bruises so bad the skin’s pulled o ff

you and they don’t see nothing; you bet women had the

vapors, still fucking do, it means it all goes aw ay in the air,

whatever happened, whatever he did and how ever he did it,

and yo u ’re left feeling sick and weak and no one’s going to say

w hy; it’s ju st wom en, they faint all the time, they’re sick all the

time, fragile things, delicate things, delicate like the best

punching bags you ever seen. They say it’s lies even if they just

did it, or maybe especially then. I don’t know really. There’s

nothing to it, no one ever heard o f it before or ever saw it or

not here or not now; in all history it never happened, or if it

happened it was the Nazis, the exact, particular Nazis in

Germany in the thirties and forties, the literal Nazis in

uniform; when they were out o f uniform they were just guys,

you know, they loved their families, they paid o ff their

whores, just regular guys. N o one else ever did anything,

certainly no one now in this fine world we have here; certainly

not the things I think happened, although I don’t know what

to call them in any serious way. Y ou just crawl into a cave o f

silence and die; w hy are there no great women artists? Some

people got nerve. Blood on cement, which is all we got in my

experience, ain’t esthetic, although I think boys some day will

do very well with it; they’ll put it in museums and get a fine

price. W on’t be their blood. It would be some cunt’s they

whispered to the night before; a girl; and then it’d be art, you

see; or you could put it on walls, make murals, be political, a

democratic art outside the museums for the people, Diego

Rivera without any conscience whatsoever instead o f the very

tenuous one he had with respect to women, and then it’d be

extremely major for all the radicals who would discover the

expressive value o f someone else’s blood and I want to tell you

they’d stop making paint but such things do not happen and

such things cannot occur, any more than the rape so-called can

happen or occur or the being beaten so bad can happen or

occur and there are no words for what cannot happen or occur

and i f you think something happened or occurred and there are

no words for it you are at a dead end. There’s nothing where

they force you; there’s nothing where you hurt so much;

there’s nothing where it matters, there’s nothing like it

anywhere. So it doesn’t feel right to make things up, as you

must do to write fiction, to lie, to elaborate, to elongate, to

exaggerate, to distort, to get tangled up in moderations or

modifications or deviations or compromises o f m ixing this

with that or combining this one with that one because the

problem is finding words for the truth, especially if no one will

believe it, and they will not. I can’t make things up because I

w ouldn’t know after a while w hat’s blood, w hat’s ink. I barely

know any words for what happened to me yesterday, which

doesn’t make tom orrow something I can conceive o f in m y

mind; I mean words I say to m yself in m y ow n head; not social

words you use to explain to someone else. I barely know

anything and if I deviate I am lost; I have to be literal, if I can

remember, which m ostly I cannot. N o one will acknowledge

that some things happen and probably at this point in time

there is no w ay to say they do in a broad sweep; you describe

the man forcing you but you can’t say he forced you. If I was a

man I could probably say it; I could say I did it and everyone

would think I made it up even though I’d just be remembering

what I did last night or twenty minutes ago or once, long ago,

but it probably w ouldn’t matter. The rapist has words, even

though there’s no rapist, he ju st keeps inventing rape; in his

mind; sure. He remembers, even though it never happened;

it’s fine fiction when he writes it down. Whereas m y mind is

getting worn away; it’s being eroded, experience keeps

washing over it and there’s no sea wall o f words to keep it

intact, to keep it from being washed away, carried out to sea,

layer by layer, fine grains washed away, a thin surface washed

away, then some more, washed away. I am fairly worn away

in m y mind, washed out to sea. It probably doesn’t matter

anyway. People lead their little lives. T here’s not much

dignity to go around. T here’s lies in abundance, and silence for

girls who don’t tell them. I don’t want to tell them. A lie’s for

when he’s on top o f you and you got to survive him being

there until he goes; M alcolm X tried to stop saying a certain

lie, and maybe I should change from Andrea because it’s a lie.

It’s just that it’s a precious thing from my mother that she tried

to give me; she didn’t want it to be such an awful lie, I don’t

think. So I have to be the writer she tried to be— Andrea; not-

cunt— only I have to do it so it ain’t a lie. I ain’t fabricating

stories. I’m making a different kind o f story. I’m writing as

truthful as the man with his fingers, if only I can remember

and say; but I ain’t on his side. I’m on some different side. I’m

telling the truth but from a different angle. I’m the one he done

it to. The bait’s talking, honey, if she can find the words and

stay even barely alive, or even just keep the blood running; it

can’t dry up, it can’t rot. The bait’s spilling the beans. The

bait’s going to transcend the material conditions o f her

situation, fuck you very much, Mr. M arx. The bait’s going

w ay past Marx. The bait’s taking her eviscerated, bleeding self

and she ain’t putting it back together, darling, because,

frankly, she don’t know how; the bait’s a realist, babe, the

bait’s no fool, she’s just going to bleed all over you and you are

going to have to find the words to describe the stain, a stain as

big as her real life, boy; a big, nasty stain; a stain all over you,

all the blood you ever spilled; that’s the esthetic dimension,

through art she replicates the others you done it to, gets the

stain to incorporate them too. It’s coming right back on you,

sink or swim; fucking drown your head in it; give in, darling;

go down. That’s the plan, in formal terms. The bait’s got a

theory; the bait’s finding a practice, working it out; the bait’s

going to write it down and she don’t have to use words, she’ll

make signs, in blood, she’s good at bleeding, boys, the vein’s

open, boys, the bait’s got plenty, each month more and more

without dying for a certain long period o f her life, she can lose

it or use it, she works in broad strokes, she makes big gestures,

big signs; oh and honey there’s so much bait around that

there’s going to be a bloodbath in the old town tonight, when

the new art gets its start. Y ou are going to be sitting in it; the

new novel; participation, it’s called; I’m smearing it all over

you. It ain’t going to be made up; it ain’t going to be a lie; and

you are going to pay attention, directly, even though it’s by a

girl, because this time it’s on you. if I find a word, I’ll use it;

but I ain’t waiting, darling, I already waited too long. If you

was raised a boy you don’t know how to get blood off, yo u ’re

shocked, surprised, in Vietnam when you see it for the first

time and I been bleeding since I was nine, I’m used to putting

m y hands in it and I live. Y ou don’t give us no words for

w hat’s true so now there’s signs, a new civilization just

starting now: her name’s not-cunt and she’s just got to express

herself, say some this and that, use w hat’s there, take w hat’s

hers: her blood’s hers; your blood’s hers. Here’s the difference

between us, sweet ass: I’m using blood you already spilled;

mine; hers; cunt’s. I ain’t so dirty as to take yours. I don’t

confuse this new manifesto with being Artaud; he was on the

other side. There are sides. If he spills m y blood, it’s art. if I put

mine on him, it’s deeply not nice or good or, as they say,

interesting; it’s not interesting. There’s a certain— shall we

understate? — distaste. It’s bad manners but not rude in an

artistically valid sense. It’s just not being the right kind o f girl.

It’s deranged but not in the Rimbaud sense. It’s just not being

M arjorie Morningstar, which is the height to which you may

aspire, failed artist but eventually fine homemaker. It’s loony,

yes, it’s got some hate in it somewhere, but it ain’t revolutionary like Sade who spilled blood with style; perhaps they think a girl can’t have style but since a girl can’t really have

anything else I think I can pull it off; me and the other bait;

there’s many styles o f allure around. Huey N ew to n ’s m y

friend and I send ten percent o f any money I have to the Black

Panthers instead o f paying taxes because they’re still bombing

the fucking Vietnamese, if you can believe it. He sends me

poems and letters o f encouragement. I write him letters o f

encouragement. I’m afraid to show him any o f m y pages I

wrote because perhaps he’s not entirely cognizant o f the

problems, esthetic and political, I face. I look for signs in the

press for if he’s decent to women but there’s not too much to

see; except you have to feel some distrust. He’s leading the

revolution right now and I think the bait’s got to have a place

in it. I am saying to him that women too got to be whole; and

old people cared for; and children educated and fed; and

women not raped; I say, not raped; I say it to him, not raped.

H e’s saying the same thing back to me in his letters, except for

the women part. He is very Mao in his poem style, because it

helps him to say what he knows and gives him authority, I can

see that, it makes his simple language look strong and

purposeful, not as if he’s not too educated. It’s brilliant for that

whereas I am more lost; I can’t cover up that I don’t have

words. I can’t tell if raped is a word he knows or not; if he

thinks I am stupid to use it or not; if he thinks it exists or not;

because we are polite and formal and encouraging to each

other and he doesn’t say. I am working m y part out. He is

taking care o f the big, overall picture, the big needs, the great

thrust forward. I am in a fine fit o f rebellion and melancholy

and I think there’s a lot that’s possible so I am in a passion o f

revolutionary fire with a new esthetic boiling in me, except for

m y terrible times. The new esthetic started out in ignorance

and ignominy, in sadness, in forgetting; it pushed past

sadness into an overt rebellion— tear this down, tear this

apart— and it went on to create: it said, w e’ll learn to write

without words and i f it happened we will find a w ay to say so

and i f it happened to us it happened. For instance, i f it

happened to me it happened; but I don’t have enough

confidence for that, really, because maybe I’m wrong, or

maybe it’s not true, or how do you say it, but if it happened to

us, to us, you know, the ones o f us that’s the bait, then it

happened. It happened. And i f it happened, it happened. We

w ill say so. We will find a w ay to say so. We will take the

blood that was spilled and smear it in public w ays so it’s art and

politics and science; the fisherman w o n ’t like the book so

w hat’s new; he’ll say it ain’t art or he’ll say it’s bullshit; but

here’s the startling part; the bait’s got a secret system o f

communication, not because it’s hidden but because the

fisherman’s fucking stupid; so arrogant; so sure o f forever and

a day; so sure he don’t listen and he don’t look and he says it

ain’t anything and he thinks that means it ain’t anything

whereas what it means is that we finally can invent: a new

alphabet first, big letters, proud, new letters from which will

come new words for old things, real things, and the bait says

what they are and what they mean, and then we get new

novels in which the goal is to tell the truth: deep truth. So

make it all up, the whole new thing, to be able to say w hat’s

there; because they are keeping it hidden now. Y o u ’re not

supposed to write something down that happened; yo u ’re

supposed to invent. W e’ll write down what happened and

invent the personhood o f who it happened to; w e’ll make a

language for her so we can tell a story for her in which she will

see what happened and know for sure it happened and it

mattered; and the boys will have to confront a new esthetic

that tells them to go suck eggs. I am for this idea; energized by

it. It’s clear that if you need the fisherman to read the book—

his critical appreciation as it were— this new art ain’t for you. If

he’s got what he did to you written on him or close enough to

him, rude enough near him, is he different, will he know? I say

he’ll have to know; it’s the brilliance o f the medium— he’s it,

the vehicle o f political and cultural transcendence as it were.

It’s a new, forthright communication— they took the words

but they left your arm, your hand, so far at least; it could

change, but for now; he’s the living canvas; he can refuse to

understand but he cannot avoid know ing; it’s your blood, he

spilled it, yo u ’ve used it: on him. It’s a simplicity Artaud

failed, frankly, to achieve. W e’ll make it new; epater the

fuckers. Then he can be human or not; he’s got a choice, which

is more than he ever gave; he can put on the uniform, honest,

literal Nazi, or not. The clue is to see what you don’t have as

the starting place and you look at it straight and you say what

does it give me, not what does it take; you say what do I have

and what don’t I have and am I making certain presumptions

about what I need that are in fact their presumptions, so much

garbage in my way, and if I got rid o f the garbage what then

would I see and could I use it and how; and when. I got hope. I

got faith. I see it falling. I see it ending. I see it bent over and

hitting the ground. And, what’s even better is that because the

fisherman ain’t going to listen as if his life depended on it we

got a system o f secret communication so foolproof no

scoundrel could imagine it, so perfect, so pure; the less we are,

the more we have; the less we matter, the more chance we get;

the less they care, the more freedom is ours; the less, the more,

you see, is the basic principle, it’s like psychological jujitsu

except applied to politics through a shocking esthetic; you use

their fucking ignorance against them; ignorance is a synonym

in such a situation for arrogance and arrogance is tonnage and

in jujitsu you use your opponent’s weight against him and you

do it if yo u ’re weak or poor too, because it’s all you have; and if

someone doesn’t know you’re human they’re a Goddamn fool

and they got a load o f ignorance to tip them over with. Y ou

ain’t got literature but you got a chance; a chance; you

understand— a chance; you got a chance because the bait’s

going to get it, and there’s going to be a lot o f w riggling things

jum ping o ff G o d ’s stick. I live in this real fine, sturdy tenement

building made out o f old stone. They used to have immigrants

sleeping in the hallways for a few pennies a night so all the

toilets are out there in the halls. They had them stacked at

night; men sleeping on top o f each other and women selling it

or not having a choice; tenement prostitution they call it in

books, how the men piled in the halls to sleep but the women

had to keep putting out for money for food. They did it

standing up. N o w you walk through the hall hoping there’s

no motherfucker with a knife waiting for you, especially in the

toilets, and if you have to pee, you are scared, and i f you have

to shit, it is fully frightening. I go with a knife in m y hand

always and I sleep with a knife under m y pillow, always. I

have not had a shit not carrying a knife since I came here. I got

a bank account. I am doing typing for stupid people. I don’t

like to make margins but they want margins. I think it’s better

i f each line’s different, if it flows like a poem, if it’s uneven and

surprising and esthetically nice. But they want it like it’s for

soldiers or zombies, everything lined up, left and right, with

hyphens breaking words open in just the right places, which I

don’t know where they are. I type, I steal but less now, really

as little as possible though I will go to waitress hell for stealing

tips, I know that, I will be a prisoner in a circle o f hell and they

will put the faces o f all the waitresses around me and all their

shabby, hard lives that I made worse, but stealing tips is easy

and I am good at it as I have been since childhood and when I

have any m oney in m y pocket I do truly leave great chunks o f

it and when I am older and rich I will be profligate and if I ever

go broke in m y old days it will be from making it up to every

waitress alive in the world then, but this generation’s getting

fucked unavoidably. Someday I will write a great book with

the lines m oving like waves in the sea, flowing as much as I

want them. I’m Andrea is what I will find a deep w ay to

express in honor o f m y mama who thought it up; a visionary,

though the vision couldn’t withstand what the man did to me

early; or later, the man, in the political sense. I make little

amounts o f m oney and I put them in the bank and each day I

go to the bank for five dollars, except sometimes I go for two

days on seven dollars. I wait in line and the tellers are very

disturbed that I have come for m y money. It’s a long walk to

the bank, it’s far aw ay because there aren’t any banks in the

neighborhood where I live, and it’s a good check on me

because it keeps me from getting money for frivolous things; I

have to make a decision and execute it. When an emergency

occurs, I am in some trouble; but if I have five dollars in my

pocket I feel I can master most situations. M y astrology said

that M ercury was doing some shit and Saturn and things

would break and fall apart and I went to unlock the two locks

on m y door to my apartment and the first lock just crumbled,

little metal pieces fell as if it was spiders giving birth, all the

little ones falling out o f it, it just seemed pulverized into grains

and it just was crushed to sand, the whole cylinder o f the lock

just collapsed almost into molecules; and the second lock just

kept turning around and around but absolutely nothing locked

or unlocked and then there was this sound o f something falling

and it had fallen through the door to the other side, it just fell

out o f the door. It was night, and even putting the chain on

didn’t help. I sat with m y knife and stared at it all night to keep

anyone from breaking in. The crisis o f getting new locks made

me destitute and desperate and on such occasions I had to steal.

I always considered it more honorable to m yself than fucking;

less honorable to who I did it to; it was new to pick me over

them. I just knew I’d live longer stealing than fucking. O f

course I stole from the weak; who doesn’t? I had thought

fucking for money was stealing from the strong but it only

robbed me, although I can’t say o f what, because there’s more

wordlessness there, more what’s never been said; I’m not

formulated enough to get at it. I had a dog someone dumped

on me saying they were going to have it killed. It was so fine;

you can weave affirmation back, there can be a sudden miracle

o f happiness; m y dog was a smiling, happy creature; I thought

o f her as the quintessential all-Amerikan, someone w holly

extroverted with no haunted insides, just this cheerful, big,

brilliant creature filled with licks and bounces; and I loved

what made her happy, a stick, a stone, I mean, things I could

actually provide. I think making her happy was m y happiest

time on earth. She was big, she bounced, she was brown and

black, she was a German shepherd, and she didn’t have any

meanness in her, just play, just jum p, just this jo y . She didn’t

have a streak o f savagery. If there was a cockroach in the

apartment, a small one because we didn’t have the monsters,

she’d stand up over it and she’d study it awhile and then she’d

pick it up in her mouth and she’d carry it to her corner o f the

room and she’d put it down and sit on top o f it. She’d be proud

and she’d sit with her head held high while the awful little

thing would crawl out from under her and get lost in some

crack in the wall. Y ou ever seen a proud dog? They have this

look o f pride that could break your heart like they done

something for you the equivalent o f getting you out from

under an avalanche and they are asking nothing in return, just

that you look at the aquiline dignity o f their snouts. I got to say

I loved her more than m y heart could bear and w e’d go on

walks and to the park but the park near me was full o f broken

glass and winos and junkies and I was afraid for her, that she’d

hurt her feet. Y o u couldn’t really let her run or anything. She

ate a lot, and I didn’t, but I felt she had certain rights, because

she depended on me or someone, she had to; so I felt I had to

feed her and I felt I had to have enough m oney and I felt her life

was in m y hands and I felt her life was important and I felt she

was the nicest, most kind creature I ever knew. She’d sit with

me and watch the door when the locks fell apart but she didn’t

grasp it and I couldn’t count on her sense o f danger, because it

w asn’t attuned to the realities o f a w om an’s life. Someone

might be afraid o f her or not. Someone might hurt her. I’d die

i f they hurted her. I’d probably have throwed m yself on her to

protect her. I ju st couldn’t bear the thought o f someone

hurting her. Her name was Gringo, because the man who had

her and who named her w asn’t a fine, upstanding citizen, he

was degenerate, and I was afraid he would hurt her, and I was

afraid she would die, and I think there is nothing worse than

knowing an animal is being hurt, except for a child, for which

I thank God I don’t have one, even though my husband would

have taken it away from me, I know. If something’s in your

charge and it must love you then for something cruel to

happen to it must shatter your heart into pieces, by which I

mean the pain is real and it is not made better by time because

the creature was innocent and you are not; or I am not. I kept her

fine. I kept her safe. I kept her sleek and beautiful and without

any sores or any illnesses or any bad things on her skin or any

marks; I kept her gleaming and proud and fine and fed; I kept

her healthy and I kept her strong and I kept her happy; and she

loved me, she did. It was a little beyond an ignorant love, I

truly believe. She knew me by my reverence for her; I was the

one that lit up inside every time my eyes beheld her. I never

could train her to do anything but sit; usually I said sit a second

after she had done it, for my own self-respect; and she pulled

me about one hundred miles an hour down the street; I loved

her exuberance and could not condemn it as bad behavior; I

loved that she was sweet and extrovert and unhaunted and I

didn’t want any shadows forming on her mind from me

shouting or pulling or being an asshole in general; I couldn’t

romp but my heart jum ped when she bounced and wagged

and waved and flew like some giant sparrow heading toward

spring; and I counted on the respect pricks have for big dogs to

keep me safe but it didn’t always, there was always ones that

wanted to fight because she was big, because they thought she

was more male than them, bigger than them, stronger than

them, especially drunks or mean men, and there was men in

the park with bigger dogs who wanted their dogs to hurt her

or fight with her or mount her or bite her or scare her or who

made me m ove by threatening to set their dog on her to show

their dog was bigger or meaner or to make me move because I

was gash according to them and they was men. It’s simple and

always the same. I moved with a deep sense o f being wronged.

I shouldn’t have had to m ove but I couldn’t risk them hurting

her— more real life with a girl and her dog who are hurting no

one. The toilet was too small to take her into and I couldn’t

leave her loose in the hall because some man upstairs, a

completely sour person, hated her and kept threatening to call

all these different city agencies with cops for animals that

would take her away; but probably I w ouldn’t have left her

there anyw ay because I’d be afraid something unexpected

would happen and she’d be helpless; so she had to stay in the

apartment when I went to the toilet and I locked the door to

protect her. It’s unimaginable, how much I loved her. She was

so deep in m y heart I w ould’ve died for her, to keep her safe.

E very single piece o f love I had left in me was love for her;

except for revolutionary love. Y o u become the guardian o f a

creature and it becomes your soul and it brings jo y back to

you, as i f you was pure and young and there was nothing

rough or mean and you had tom orrow, really. She made me

happy by being happy and she loved me, a perfect love, and I

was necessary, beyond the impersonal demands o f the revolution per se. I had always admired the Black Panthers, with a

certain amount o f skepticism, because I been on the streets

they walked and there’s no saints there, M ao’s long march

didn’t go through Camden or Oakland or Detroit or Chicago.

I didn’t get close with Huey until I saw a certain picture. I think

it will be in m y brain until I die. I had admired him; how he

created a certain political reality; how he stood up to police

violence, how he faced them down, then the Survival

Program , free food for children, free shoes, some health care,

teaching reading and writing; it was real brilliant; and he ju st

didn’t die, I mean, you fucking could not kill him, and I

admire them that will not die. I knew he had run wom en but I

also been low ; I couldn’t hold it against him; I couldn’t hold

anything against him, really, because it’s rough to stay alive

and reach for dignity at the same time; you can fucking feed

children on top o f that and you got my respect. I stayed aloof,

also because I wasn’t some liberal white girl, middle-class by

skin, I had to take his measure and I couldn’t do it through

public perceptions or media or propaganda or the persona that

floated through the air waves. I saw him do fucking brilliant

things; I mean, you got to know how hard it is to do fucking

anything; and I saw him survive shootings, the police were

trying to assassinate him, no doubt; and I saw him transcend it;

and I saw him build, not just carry a fucking gun. Then there’s

this picture. H e’s been shot by the police and he’s cuffed to a

gum ey in an emergency room at Kaiser Hospital, October

1967. His chest is bare and raised; it’s raised because his arms

are cuffed to the legs o f the gurney, pulled back towards his

head; he’s wounded but they pulled his arms back so his chest

couldn’t rest on the gurney, so he’s stretched by the manacles,

his chest is sticking up because o f the strain caused by how his

arms are pulled back and restrained, it would hurt anyone, I

have been tied that way, it hurts, you don’t need a bullet in you

for it to give you pain, there’s a white cop in front o f him, fully

dressed, fully armed, looking with surprise at the camera, and

there’s this look on H uey’s face, half smile, half pain, defiant,

his eyes are open, he ain’t going to close them and he ain’t

going to die and he ain’t going to beg and he ain’t going to give

in and he ain’t thinking o f cutting his losses and he ain’t no

slobbering, frightened fool, and behind him there’s a white

nurse doing something and a sign that says “ D irty Needles

And Syringes O n ly, ” and she ain’t looking at him at all, even

though he’s right next to her, right against her side almost. I

have been cuffed that way, physically restrained. I have been

lying there. I have memories when I see this picture, I see m y

life in some o f its aspects, I see a hundred thousand porn

magazines too in which the woman, some woman, is cuffed

the same way, and the cop is or isn’t in the photograph, and the

cuffed woman is white or black, and I see on H uey’s face a

defiance I have never seen on her face or on m y own, not that I

have seen mine but I know what the photo would show, a

vapid pain, a blank, hooded stare, eyes that been dead a long,

long time, eyes that never stared back let alone said fuck you. I

see that he is defiant and that the cop is scared and that the cop

has not won. I see that even though H uey’s chest is raised

because his arms are stretched back and he is cuffed there is

pride in that raised chest. I see that his eyes are open and I see

that there is a clearness in his eyes, a willfulness, they are not

fogged or doped or droopy. I see that he is looking directly at

the camera, he’s saying I am here, this is me, I am, and the

camera can’t take his picture without making his statement. I

see that there is no look o f shame or coyness on his face, he

ain’t saying fuck me. I see that his nakedness is different from

mine, that his pride is unknown to me. I see that the cop and

the nurse are barely existing and that Huey is vivid and real and

alive, he’s jum ping o ff the page and they are robots, ciphers,

automatons, functionaries, he’s bursting with defiance, the

raised chest, however painful, is bursting with pride. I wonder

if anyone would ever jerk o ff to the picture; you know, black

boy in chains; but I don’t believe they would, I don’t, he’s

nobody’s piece o f meat, his eyes w ouldn’t let you and yo u ’d

w orry what he’d do when he’s uncuffed later, his eyes would

see you and he’d come to get you and yo u ’d know it in your

heart and in your hand. H e’s oppressed. He didn’t learn to read

really until he was eighteen. H e’s been low ; he knows. H e’s

put together a grassroots organization that’s defying the cops;

he’s made it international in scope, in reach, in importance.

H e’s poor. He was born socially invisible but darling look at

him now; manacled on that gurney he is fully vivid and alive

and the white nurse and the white cop are sim ply factotums o f

power with nothing that is their ow n; the life’s with him.

They got nothing that does express lam\ whereas Huey, shot,

manacled, naked down to his waist, says lam with his strange,

proud smile that shows the pain and his clear, wide-open eyes

that don’t look away but look right through you, they see you

front to back; and I’ve been on that bed, it’s the bed o f the

oppressed, the same cuffs, the same physical pain, as bad, I

think as bad, the same jeopardy, I have been on that bed; and

they want him to give in and fade away and yet he has endured

and in the picture he is declaring that he will endure, it is in

every aspect o f his demeanor and the camera shows it, he’s

wounded but he’s not afraid, he’s manacled but he’s not

surrendering; he ain’t fucked; he just ain’t fucked; there’s no

other w ay to say it. Even if he’s been fucked in his life, by

which I mean literally, because I don’t know what he’s done or

not done and there’s not too many strangers to being fucked

on the street, he ain’t been fucked; it ain’t what he is. I love him

for it. I fucking love him for it. He’s spectacular and there is a

deep humanism in him that expresses itself precisely in

surviving, not going under, standing up; even tied down, he’s

standing up; and he’s gone beyond the first steps, the original

Black Panther idea that had to do with arming against police

violence, now he’s an apostle o f social equality and he is

fucking feeding the children; he’s been physically hurt and he’s

been laid out on the bed o f pain and his idea o f what’s human

has gotten broader and kinder and more inclusive, and that’s

revolutionary love, and I know it, and I got it, and while

there’s many reasons he can’t trust me, nor me him, we have

been on the same bed o f pain, cuffed, and I didn’t have his

pride, and I need him to teach me; I need to learn it— defiance,

the kind a bullet can’t stop. I don’t know i f he’s kind to women

or not and it worries me but I put it aside because there’s what I

know about that bed o f pain he’s cuffed to; I think I’m

annihilated inside by it; I think I’m shot to hell inside, with

nothing but gangrene everywhere there was a wound; I see, I

feel, an inner collapse that comes from the humiliation o f how

they do you on the bed o f pain; bang bang. I tell him I know

the man; but I don’t know if he knows what I mean. I know

the man. He acts to me with respect as if he grasps m y

meaning. I am trying to say, without saying, that the man

fucked me too; but I don’t know how to say I became it and he

didn’t and now I’m refusing to be it or I’m in the process and

that there’s profound injustice in making someone it, in

crushing them down so their insides are fucked in perpetuity. I

die for men to admire, from a stance o f parity; I admire Huey; I

am struggling for parity, what I see as his revolutionary

dignity and self-definition, his bravery— not in defying

authority, I been through that, but in upending the reality that

said what he was and what was on top o f him. He sends me

poems and m axims, and I am thinking whether to send him

some. I love him. I think maybe he could be for women. In

some speeches he says so. He says men have been arrogant

over women and there’s new freedoms women need to have.

During the days I type for four dollars an hour, which means

that if I am prepared to go ape-shit or stir crazy I could

certainly make up to thirty-two dollars a day, on some days;

but I can only stand to do it four hours or maybe three, and I

really couldn’t stand to do it every day, although I have tried to

for the money, I have tried; if I could do three hours every day

I would be fine, unless something happened. It’s just that I do

it and I do it and I do it and not much time has elapsed it turns

out and I get bored and restless as if m y mind is physically

lifting itself out o f m y head and hitting the walls like some

trapped fly. I feel a profound distaste for it, sitting there and

doing this stupid shit. I feel a bitterness, almost guilt or

remorse, it’s unbearable in the minute or at that time as if I’m

betraying being alive, there’s too much m oving in me and I

cannot fucking waste it in this chickenshit way. It’s not a

matter o f having an idea o f a picture o f life, or taking exception

to the idea o f typing or being a secretary or doing something o f

the sort, I don’t have some prior idea o f how I should be or

how life should be, a magazine picture in my head, you know,

or from television, or from the romances other people say they

want. It ain’t a thought in any sense at all. It’s that I am not her

and I cannot be her, I fucking am not her, I can’t do it, I can’t sit

still and type the shit. It’s just that I want what I want, which is

throughout me, not just my brain, and it’s to feel and move

and fuck. I don’t try to resolve it. I figure you have to be

humble before life. Life tells you, you don’t tell it, and you

can’t argue with what w on’t sit still long enough to be argued

with. I have to break loose one w ay or another, drink or fuck,

find some real noise, you know, a fucking stream o f real noise

and messing around to jum p right in; that’s my way. If it’s

tepid I don’t want it and I don’t do it from habit or just because

it’s there to be done, it’s a big change I made in myself, I have

to feel it bad, I don’t do nothing on automatic; people think if

it’s on the bad side it ain’t bourgeois but I don’t; I think if it’s

tepid it don’t matter what it is class-wise or style-wise. I don’t

solve things in m y mind to impose it on reality, because it ain’t

worth much to do so; for instance, to say you don’t want to be

some fucked thing so don’t fuck. Fucking never feels like you

will end up some fucked thing anyway; it pushes you out so

fast and so far it ain’t a matter o f what you think and it’s stupid

to misidentify it, the problem. Y o u ’re some poor, fragile

person in the middle o f an ocean you never seen the whole of;

you don’t know where it starts or where it stops or how deep

down it goes and what you got to do is swim and hope, hope

and swim; you learn everything you know from it, it don’t

learn a fucking thing from you. Y ou can make promises to

yourself in your mind but your mind is so small up against the

world; you got to have some respect for the world; or so I see it

and that’s m y way; but, then, I ain’t holding out for a pension.

I type m y hours, however many I can make it through,

putting as much pressure on m yself as I can stand, which isn’t

making a lot o f progress, and I keep a time sheet, which I make

as honest as possible but it is hard not because I want to lie but

because I ju st fucking cannot keep track, I can’t pay enough

attention to it to keep track, so I just approximate sort o f

combining what I need with what seems plausible and I come

up with something. I cannot write every fucking thing down

to keep track o f m y time as i f I’m some asshole and I find it

profoundly unbearable to do robot stuff. Sometimes I w ork

for a writer, a poet, and I deliver packages, which at least

means I go on subways and taxis and see places, and I file

papers aw ay alphabetically and I type, except she says you

have to put a space before the colon and a space after it, one

space after it instead o f just no space before it and two spaces

after it as every typist does. In theory I am for defying

convention but typing is something you do automatic like

yo u ’re the machine, not it, and you learn to put two spaces

after the colon and none before it and your hands do that and

your brain ain’t fast enough to stop them and I spend half my

time correcting the stupid thing with white Liquid Paper and

eraser stuff and trying to align it right when I’m typing the

colon back in and I just really want her to drop dead because o f

it. Passions can be monumental. I can barely keep my ass on

the typing chair at her desk; I mean, she owns the desk; she has

her desk, a big desk, and then the desk where I sit, a little desk

and her desk is in her big room and m y desk is in a little

anteroom right o ff her big room so she can always see me but

I’m o ff to the side, relegated to being help in a clear w ay; it has

its own eloquence and I feel it acutely and it gets me mad. I try

to take the typing home with me so I don’t have to sit at the

little desk in the little room with her watching but she wants

me to do it there and there’s this tug o f war. She’s real

seductive and I am too fucking bored to care because if I give in

to it then I will have to be there more and if I am there more I

will have to type more and if I have to type more I will die.

There’s apparently some edge she sees; she thinks I’m

turbulent, she says; I think I’m calm and patient in a world o f

endless and chaotic bullshit, which I say but it falls on deaf

ears; I smile and I’m nice and completely calm except for when

I have to bolt but she sees some street tough or something wild

and gets all excited and I don’t have a lot o f respect for it; she

says I’m pure. I just smile because I don’t know what bullshit it

is exactly. Even if I don’t type she keeps me around. I can

barely keep m yself under wraps sometimes, frankly; I want to

bolt. I smile, I’m nice, I’m calm, but she treats me careful, as if

I’m volatile or dangerous somehow, which I am not, because

in m y soul I am a real sweetheart which is the truth, a deep

truth, an honest truth, I don’t yell or shout or think how to

hurt people and I feel dedicated to peace as she is too. I just get

bored so deep it hurts the pits o f me, stomach and groin

precisely, I feel a long pain and I can’t sit still through it; it’s

hit-the-road pain. She tells me how to be a writer and I listen

because as long as I am listening I don’t have to type; I listen,

though often I’m bored, and I haven’t mastered the art o f inner

stillness, though I will, I am sure. Then there’s the lovemaking

part, a moment comes, and I slide out from under, with a

certain newfound grace, I must say, and if I can’t slide, I bolt,

and it’s abrupt. She keeps me on, even though I never exactly

get the typing done or the filing done and she never nails me;

never. It’s a long walk to her place to type and I walk it often,

because I fucking love to walk, even though it’s stupid and not

safe and you have to be a prophet who can look down a street

and know what it’s got in store for you, and I do it happy and

proud and I fucking love the long walks. I go there and back

early and late and sometimes I get there and I just can’t bear to

stay so I leave right away, I take some cup o f coffee or food,

fast, with her, she’ll always make me something as if it’s

natural, and the typing doesn’t get done but I don’t have some

money either. Other times she gives me a cash advance and I

have it burning in m y hand and if I’m feeling slow and

stringent with m yself I get it to the bank and i f I'm feeling

restless, all speeded up, wanting to spit in the eye o f God, out

drink Him, out fuck Him, I keep it on me. I type, I walk long

walks across town, ballets on cement, jum ping and hopping

and then a slow, melancholy step, solemn or arms sw inging,

in the face o f the wind or in drizzle or rain or in sun, in calm,

cool sun. I walk m y sweet and jubilant dog in the neighborhood protecting the pads o f her feet from the stupid glass the winos leave all broken all over and the fucking junkie shit

that’s all over, and then there’s the time each day I sit down in

purposeful concentration to write in a notebook, some

sentences on a buried truth, an unnamed reality, things that

happened but are denied. It is hard to describe the stillness it

takes, the difficulty o f this act. It requires an almost perfect

concentration which I am trying to learn and there is no w ay to

learn it that is spelled out anywhere or so I can understand it

but I have a sense that it’s completely simple, on the order o f

being able to sit still and keep your mind dead center in you

without apology or fear. I squirm after some time but it ain’t

boredom, it’s fear o f w hat’s possible, how much you can

know if you can be quiet enough and simple enough. I m ove

around, m y mind wanders, I lose the ability to take words and

roll them through m y brain, m ove with them into their

interiors, feel their colors, touch w hat’s under them, where

they come from long ago and w ay back. I get frightened

seeing what’s in m y own mind if words get put to it. T here’s a

light there, it’s bright, it’s wide, it could make you blind if you

look direct into it and so I turn away, afraid; I get frightened

and I run and the only w ay to run is to abandon the process

altogether or com prom ise it beyond recognition. I think about

Celine sitting with his shit, for instance; I don’t know w hy he

didn’t run, he should’ve. It’s a quality you have to have o f

being near mad and at the same time so quiet in your heart that

you could pass for a spiritual warrior; you could probably

break things with the power in your mind. You got to be able

to stand it, because it’s a powerful and disturbing light, not

something easy and kind, it comes through your head to make

its w ay onto the page and you get fucking scared so your mind

runs away, it wanders, it gets distracted, it buckles, it deserts,

it takes a Goddamn freight train if it can find one, it wants

calming agents and soporifics, and you mask that you are

betraying the brightest and best light you will ever see, you are

betraying the mind that can be host to it; Blake’s light, which

he was not afraid o f and did not betray; Whitman’s light which

he degraded into some fucking singsong song like he was

Dinah Shore or Patti Page, how much is that doggie in the

w indow; the words didn’t rise up from the light, only from a

sentimental wish, he had a shadow life and in words he piled

shadow on shadow so there’s this tumult, a chaos o f dreams

running amok; dreams are only shadows; whereas Blake’s

light is perfect and pure, inside the words, so lucid, so simple,

so plain; never a cartoonish lie. O f course it’s different for me

because I turned tricks and been fucked nearly to death and I

have been made weary with dirt and m y mind’s been buried

alive, really, smashed down right into the ground, pushed

under deep; but something ain’t different if I could conquer the

fear o f seeing and knowing, if I wasn’t so afraid o f the light

burning right through m y stupid brain. Y ou want to smoke a

joint or something to make it calmer and duller; not brighter;

it ain’t brighter; it calms you right down or it frenzies you up

but so you are distracted, mentally m oving here and there,

you want something between you and the light, a shield, a

permeable barrier, you want to defuse it or deflect it, to

m ellow it out, to make it softer, not so deadly to your own

soul, not so likely to blow all your own circuits, you can’t

really stand too much light in a world where you got to get

used to crawling around like an insect in the dark, because it’s

like mining coal in that if you don’t get out o f the mine what

goes through you will collapse you. Y o u r mind does stupid

tricks to mask that you are betraying something o f grave

importance. It wanders so you w o n ’t notice that you are

deserting your own life, abandoning it to triviality and

garbage, how you are too fucking afraid to use your own brain

for what it’s for, which is to be a host to the light, to use it, to

focus it; let it shine and carry the burden o f what is illuminated,

everything buried there; the light’s scarier than anything it

shows, the pure, direct experience o f it in you as if your mind

ain’t the vegetable thing it’s generally conceived to be or the

nightmare thing you know it to be but a capacity you barely

imagined, real; overwhelm ing and real, pushing you out to

the edge o f ecstasy and knowing and then do you fall or do you

jum p or do you fly? Life can concentrate itself right in your head

and you get scared; it is cowardice. I notice that my eyes start to

wander across the wall, back and forth, keep wandering across

nothing, or looking at the fucking paint, I notice that my feet are

moving and I’m shifting on the chair, a straight-back wood chair

you have to sit still on, there’s no license to move but I’m

moving, rattling m y feet, rocking, rocking on m y heels, and

then there’s an urgent sensation in m y thighs and in my hips and

wherever sex is down there, whatever you want to call it, there’s

only bad names for it but it isn’t bad and it is real and it sends you

out, it sends you away, it makes you impatient and distracted,

and I feel like busting out, and some nights I do, I bust out. I take

all the money I got on me, and if it’s ten dollars I’m flush, and I

ju st bolt, I get out and drink, I find a man, sometimes a

woman, sometimes both, I like both at once, I like being

drunk, or I start out just for a drink and I end up with

someone, drunk; fucking happy drunk; no light but everything glistens; no illumination but everything shines. Som etimes I ju st walk, I can walk it off, aimlessly. It’s as dangerous as fucking, takes nearly the same adrenaline, just to take a walk

at night, even if you walk towards the neon and not towards

the dark park; ain’t a woman in Amerika walks towards the

park. If I can calm m yself I go home. But there’s times if I was

a man I’d kill someone. I feel wild and mean and I’m tired o f

being messed with, I got invisible bars all around me and I

have blame in my heart to them that put them there and I want

to fucking tear them apart, I want my insides turned out in

bruising them, I don’t want no skin left on me that ain’t

roughed them up, I want them bloodied, I want to dance in

men’s blood, the cha-cha, the polka, the tango, the rhumba,

hard, fast, angular dances or stomping dances or slow killing

dances, the murder waltz, I want to mix it up with killing right

next to me, on m y side; it’s hot in my heart and cold in my

brain and I ain’t ever going to feel sorry; or I’d take one o f them

boys and I’d turn him inside out and put something up his ass

and I’d hear him howl and I’d expect a thank-you and a yes

m a’am; and I would get it. D on’t matter how dangerous you

feel, all the danger’s to you, so it’s best to settle down and end

up back inside your stupid fucking walls that you wanted so

much; alone, inside the walls, a Valium maybe or a ’lude so

you don’t do no damage to yourself; love your walls, citizen. I

want them bruised and bloodied but I don’t get what I want as

m y mama used to tell me but I didn’t believe her; besides I

wanted something different then; her point was that I had to

learn the principle that I wasn’t supposed to get what I wanted;

and m y point was that I wasn’t going to learn it. Y ou don’t

name someone not-cunt and then betray the meaning and

make them fit in cages; I didn’t learn it, fucking bitch o f a

mother. It’s a rainy night. The rain is slick over the cement and

on the buildings like diamonds dripping; a liquid dazzle all soft

and rolling and swelled up, like a teardrop. It’s one o f them

magic nights where the rain glow s and the neon is dull next to

it; like God lit a silver flame in the water, it’s a warm , silver,

glassy shine, it sparkles, it’s a night but it ain’t dark

because it’s a slick light you could skate on and everything

looks translucent and as if it’s m oving, it slides, it shines. It’s

beckoning to me as i f God took a paint brush and covered the

w orld in crystal and champagne. It’s wet diamonds out there,

lush and liquid, I never could pass up the sparkle, it’s a wet,

shimmering night, a wet, dazzling night; but warm, as if it’s

breathing all over you, as if it’s wrapped around you, a

cocoon, that w ispy stuff. If there’s acid in your brain

everything’s fluid and monstrous bright; this is as if the acid’s

out there, spread over the city, the sidewalks are drenched in it

and the buildings are bathed in it and the air is saturated with it,

nothing’s standing still and it is monstrous bright and I love

the fucking city when it’s stoned. Inside it’s dull and dry and

I’m not in a constructive mood and there is a pain that runs

down me like a river, a nasty, surging river, a hard river, a

river that starts up high and races down to below falling more

than flowing, falling and breaking, shattering; it’s a river that

goes through me top to bottom; the pain’s intractable and I can

barely stand it; it’s not all jo ie de vivre when a girl goes

dancing; the pain’s a force o f nature beyond my ability to bear

and I can’t take the edge o ff it very easy and I can’t stand

needles and I can’t sit still with it and I can’t rip it out, although

if it was located right precisely in m y heart I would try, I

would take m y fucking hands and I would take m y fucking

fingers and I would rip m y chest open and I would try. It’s

raining and the rain makes me all steamy and damp inside and

out and it ain’t a man I want, it’s a drink, a dozen fucking

drinks to blot out the hard pain and the hard time, each and

every dick I ever sucked, and the bottle ain’t enough because I

can’t stand the quiet, a quiet bottle in a quiet room; I can’t

stand the quiet, lonely bottle in the quiet, lonely room. Lonely

ain’t a state o f mind, it’s a place o f being; a room with no one

else in it, a street with no one else on it; a city abandoned in the

rain; em pty, wet streets; cement that stretches uptown,

downtown, empty, warm, wet, until the sky starts, a

perspiring sky; empty cars parked on empty streets, damp,

deserted streets lined with dark, quiet buildings, civilized,

quiet stone, decorous, a sterile urban formalism; the windows

are closed, they’re sleeping or dead inside, you w on’t know

until morning really, a gas could have seeped in and killed

them in the night; or invaders from outer space; or some lethal

virus. I need noise; real noise; honest, bad noise; not random

sounds or a few loud voices or the electronic drone o f

someone’s television seeping out o f a cracked w indow; not

some dignified singer or some meaningful lyric; not something small or fine or good or right; I need music so loud you

can’t hear it, as when all the trees in the forest fall; and I need

noise so real it eats up the air because it can’t live on nothing; I

need noise that’s like steak, just so thick and just so tough and

ju st so immoral, thick and tough and dead but bloody, on a

plate, for the users, for the fucking killers, to still their hearts,

to numb anything still left churning; a percussive ambience for

the users. It’s got to be brute so it blocks out anything subtle or

nuanced or kind, even, and it’s got to be unceasing so you can’t

hear a human breath and it’s got to stomp on you so your heart

almost stops beating and it’s got to be lunatic, unorganized,

perpetual, and it has to be in a crowded room where there’s

gristle and muscle and cold, mean men and you can’t hear the

timbre o f their voices and you don’t need to see them or touch

them because the noise has you, it’s air, it’s water, you

breathe, you swim; I need noise, and it’s too late to buy a bottle

anyway, even if I had enough money, because it is very dear, it

would be like buying a diamond tiara for a princess or some

fine clothes, a fine jew el, it is out o f m y reach, I have not had

one o f m y own ever and I don’t count the bottles you can’t see

in the paper bags because that is a different thing altogether,

more like gasoline or like someone took matches and lit up

your throat or yo u ’re pouring kerosene down it or some

sharp-edged thing scrapes it raw. I need enough bills to keep,

drinking so no one’s going to chase me aw ay or say I can’t pay

rent on the stool or so I don’t have to smile at no one or so no

bartender don’t have me throwed out; I am fearful about that;

they always treat you so illegitimate but if you can show

enough money they will tolerate you sitting there. There’s not

enough money for me to eat even if they’d let me so I put that

out o f m y mind, I would like lobster o f course with the biggest

amount o f drawn butter, just drenched in it, ju st so much it

drips down and you can feel it spreading out inside your

mouth all rich and glorious, it’s like some divine silky stu ff but

there’s never enough o f it and I have to ask for more and they

act parsimonious and shocked. If you sit at a table you have to

buy dinner, they don’t have some idea that you could just sit

there and be cool and watch or have a little o f this and a little o f

that; they only have the idea that everyone’s lying, you know,

everyone’s pretending, everyone’s trying to rip them off,

everyone’s pretending to be rich so they have to see the money

or everyone’s pretending they’re going to eat so they have to

see the m oney or everyone’s pretending they can pay for the

drinks so they have to see the money and if yo u ’re a woman

you don’t get a table even i f you got money; m y idea is if I have

enough m oney and I put it out in front o f me on the bar and I

keep drinking and drinking I can stay there and then I don’t

have to look to m y right or to m y left at a man for a fucking

thing; I can i f I want but I am not obliged. I’m usually too shy

to push m y w ay in and I’ve never tried it, I ju st know yo u ’re

not supposed to be there alone, but tonight I want to drink, it’s

what I want like some people want to win the Indy 500 or

there’s some that want to walk on the moon; I want to drink;

pure. I want to sit there and have m y ow n stool and I don’t

want to have to be worried about being asked to leave or made

to leave because I’m ju st some impoverished girl or gash that’s

loose. I will stare at the clear liquid, crystal, in the glass, and I

will contemplate it as a beautiful thing and I will feel the pain

that is monumentally a part o f me and I will keep drinking and

I will feel it lessen and I will feel the warmth spread out all over

me inside and I will feel the surging, hard, nasty river go

warmer and smoother and silkier as the Stoli runs with it, as it

falls from top to bottom inside me, first it’s on the surface o f

the river, then it’s deeper down in it, then it’s a silk, burning

stream, a great, warm stream, and it will gentle the terrible

river o f pain. I will think deeply; about art; about life; I will

keep thoughts pouring through me as inside I get warmer and

calmer and it hurts less, the hurt dims and fades or hides under

a fucking rock, I don’t care; and m y brow will curl, you know,

sullen, troubled, melancholy, as if I’m some artist in m y own

right myself; and the noise will be beautiful to me, part o f a

new esthetic I am cultivating, and I will hear in it the tumult o f

bare existence and the fierce resonance o f personal pain as if it’s

a riff from Charlie Parker to God and I will hear in it the

anarchic triumph o f m y own individual soul over the deep evil

that has maimed me. I take the bills and crush them into m y

pocket and I walk, I run, I light down the stairs and out the

building, I leave my quiet room, and I hit the streets and I

walk, fast, dedicated, determined, stubborn, filled with fury,

spraying piss and vinegar, to M ax’s, about twelve blocks from

where I live, an artists’ restaurant and bar, because I know it

will be filled with ramrod hard noise and heat, a crush o f hard,

noisy men, artists and poseurs and I don’t know the difference,

poseurs and the famous and I don’t know the difference, it’s a

modern crime but I can’t concentrate on it enough to

remember the ones you’re supposed to know, except Warhol

because he’s so strange and he’d stand out anywhere and I

don’t want to go near him; but the difference mostly is that I

think I am the artist, not them, but you can’t say that and it’s

hard even to keep thinking it though I don’t know w hy it’s so

hard, maybe because girls aren’t ever it; but all the poseurs and

all the famous will be at the tables where I can’t go, even if I

had money to eat they w ouldn’t let me eat there, not alone,

and I w o n ’t be one o f the pleading girls who is begging to be

allowed to go to the tables, I will just get a stool at the bar if the

guy at the door lets me in, he might not and usually I am too

shy to defy him and I hang tight with a man but tonight I want

in myself, I want the noise and the hard edge and the crush and

I want to drink, I want to find a place at the bar for m yself and

it’s got m y name on it even though I don’t got no name for the

purposes o f the man at the door but the stool’s mine and I will

drink and I will stay as long as I have bills in front o f me and it’s

an unwritten law about girls, that they don’t let you sit

anywhere, so you never quite understand w hy you can be

somewhere sometimes and not the same place the next time

and you figure out you got to hang on to a man and you are his

shadow, like Wendy sewing Peter Pan’s shadow back on. It

sure insures a steady flow o f affection wom an to man if you

can’t even sit down without one. Tonight I have a singular

distaste for a man. I’m not starting out with any interest

whatsoever. H e’d have to catch m y eye like starlight or it’d

have to be like fairy dust where you want some and you need a

taste, it’s something that tickles you deep down but you can’t

reach it to scratch, like the cut o f a record you listen to a

thousand times or you got a taste you can’t get rid o f so yo u ’re

like some fucking hamster on one o f them wheels just running

and running or yo u ’re skim ming coke o ff the top o f something or smack o ff the top o f something, you just get smitten,

lightly but completely, stuck in the moment but also riveted

so you can’t shake it loose, infatuated now , freedom now ,

there’s some special charge com ing from him and yo u ’re

plugged in and it’s sparking, it’s not like you want to get laid

and yo u ’re looking for someone w h o ’s going to be good, it’s

more like some trait you can’t identify strikes you wham , it’s

got an obsession lurking under it, it’s a light feeling but under

it is a burning habit, a habit you ain’t got yet but you just want

to play with it once, like skinpopping heroin or something,

you know, it ain’t serious but you want it. I take an energetic

walk with the city all glowing wet, all sparkling, for me, as if

it’s for me, the light’s for me and the rain’s for me and it’s

stoned out o f its fucking mind for me; and the buildings are

just pure glitter and the light’s coming down from heaven

luscious and wet; for me. The boy at the door can’t keep me

out because I stride in and I am aglow; he’s a mandarin

standing there with his little list and his leather jacket and his

pretensions and his snobbish good looks and I mumble words

I know he can’t hear and I never yet met a man who wasn’t

stupider than me and he’s trying to decide am I someone or not

and I am not fucking anyone but I am striding in my

motorcycle boots and I am wet and I am bound for glory at the

bar and I push m y w ay through the crowd and fuck him and

he’s watching me, he sees that I ain’t headed for a table which

would transgress the laws o f the universe, and it ain’t a girl’s

trick to sit somewhere she ain’t entitled because a man didn’t

pick her out already; he sees I want the bar and I suppose it’s

faintly plausible that a girl might want a drink on her own or it

confuses him enough that he hesitates and he who hesitates is

lost. I take out all the bills I have and he’s watching me do it

and I put it down in front o f me, a nice pile, substantial, and I

am firm ly sitting on a stool and I have spread m y elbows out

on the bar to take up enough space to declare I am alone and

here to drink and he don’t know I don’t have more money and

I order m y Stoli on the rocks and I ain’t making no move to

take m y change or m ove m y money so he relaxes as if letting

me there will not do monumental harm to the system that is in

place and that it is his jo b to protect and the bodies close in

around me to protect me from his scrutiny and the noise closes

in around me and I am swallowed up and I disappear and I am

completely cosseted and private and safe and I feel like some

new thing, just new ly alive, and there’s the placenta hugging

me and I’m wet with fucking life and I stare into m y fucking

drink, m y triumphal drink, I stare into it as if it’s tea leaves and

I’m the w orld ’s oldest, wisest gypsy, I got gold earrings down

to m y knees and I got foresight and hindsight and I am a reader

o f history, there’s layers o f history, vulgar and occult, in the

stu ff and if you lit a fire to it yo u ’d burn history up. And shit I

love it; a solitary human being covered all over by noise, a

dense noise that bubbles and burns and cracks all over you like

fire, small fire, a million tiny, exploding fires; or a superhuman embrace by some green, slim y, scaly monster, it’s big and all over you and messy, it’s turbulent and dramatic and

ever so much bigger than a man and its embrace is overwhelming, a descent, an invasion that covers the terrain, a

crush o f locusts but you aren’t repelled, only exhilarated at

how awesome it is, how biblical, how spectacular; like as i f it

took you back to ancient E gypt and you saw something

sublime in the desert and you had to walk across it but you

could; it wraps itself around you like some spectacular excess

o f nature not man, yo u ’re crawling with it but it ain’t bad and

it ain’t loathsome and there’s no fear, it’s just exactly extreme

enough and wild enough and it says it’s nighttime in human

history now in Am erika and Moses has his story and you have

yours and each o f you gets the whole universe to roll around in

because everything was made to converge at the point where

you are amidst all the rest o f life o f whatever kind, com position, or characteristics, it’s a great mass all around you, the blob, a loud blob, Jell-O , loud Jell-O , and yo u ’re some frail,

simple thing at the center and what you are to them doesn’t

matter because the noise protects you from knowing what you

are to them; noise has a beauty and noise has a function and a

quiet girl sometimes needs it because the night is long and life

is hard and pain is real and you stare into the glass and you

drink, darling, you drink, and you contemplate and you

drink; you go slow and you speed up and you drink; and you

are a deep thinker and you drink; and you have some hazy,

romantic thoughts and some vague philosophical leanings and

you drink; and you remember some pictures that flash by in

your mind and you drink; and there’s sad feelings for a fleeting

minute and you drink; and you choreograph an uprising, the

lumpen rise up, and you drink; and there’s Camden reaching

right out for you, it’s taking you back, and you drink; a man

nudges you from the right and you drink; he puts his face right

up close to yours and you drink; he’s talking about something

or other and you drink; you don’t look left or right, you just

drink, it’s worship, it’s celebration, you’d kneel down except

for that you might not be able to synchronize your movements, in your heart you kneel; and you drink; you taste it and

you roll it around your tongue and down on into your throat

and down on into your chest and you get fiery and warm and

you drink it down hard and fast and you sit stone still in

solemn concentration and you drink; the noise holds you

there, it’s almost physical, the noise, it’s a superhuman

embrace, bigger than a man’s, it’s swamp but not swam py, it’s

dry and dark and hot and popping, it’s dense and down and

dirty and you drink; the noise keeps you propped up, your

back upright and your legs bent and your feet firm ly balanced

on the stool, except the stool’s higher now, and you drink; and

yo u ’re like Alice, you’re getting smaller and it’s getting

bigger, and then you remember Humpty Dum pty was a

fucking eggshell and you could fall and break and D orothy got

lost in Oz and Cinderella was made into a pumpkin or nearly

such and there’s a terrible decline and fall awaiting you, fear

and travail, because the m oney’s gone, you been handing it

over to the big man behind the bar and you been drinking and

you been contemplating and the pile’s gone and there’s terrible

challenges ahead, like physically getting o ff the stool and

physically getting out o f the room and physically getting

home; it hardly seems possible that you could actually have so

many legs and none o f them have any bones that stand up

straight and you break it down into smaller parts; pay up so the

bartender don’t break your fingers; get o ff the stool; stand up;

walk, try not to lean on anyone, you can’t use the men as

leaning posts, you can’t volley yourself to the front sort o f

springing o ff one after the other, because one or another will

consider it affection; get to the door; don’t fall on the mandarin

with the list, don’t trip in front o f him, don’t throw up; open

the door on your own steam; get out the door fully clothed,

jacket, T-shirt, keys; once outside, you make another plan.

These are hard things; some o f them may actually be

impossible. It may be impossible to pay the bartender because

you may have drunk too much and it may be impossible to get

o ff the stool and it may be impossible to walk and it may be

impossible to stand up and it may be impossible to find the

door. It’s sad, yo u ’re an orphan and it’s hard to concentrate,

what with poor nutrition and a bad education; but sociology

w ill not save your ass if you drank more money than you got

because a citizen has to pay their bar bills. There’s tw o dollars

sitting on the bar in front o f you, the remains o f your pile like

old bones, fragments o f an archaic skeleton, little remnants o f

a big civilization dug up and yo u ’re eyeing it like it’s the grail

but with dishonorable intent and profane desire. It’s rightly

the bartender’s. H e’s been taking the money as it’s been due

with righteous discipline, which is w hy you ain’t overdrawn

on the account; you asked him in a tiny mouse voice afraid o f

the answer, you squeaked in the male din, a frightened

whisper, you asked him if you owed, you got up the nerve,

and yo u ’re straight with him as far as it goes but these extra

bills are rightly his; or you could have another drink; but you

had wanted to end it well, with some honor; and also he ain’t a

waitress, dear, and the m oney’s got his mark on it; and he ain’t

cracked a smile or said a tender word all night, which a girl

ain’t used to, he don’t like girl drinkers as a matter o f principle

you assume, he’s fast, he’s quiet, he’s got a hard, cold face with

a square ja w and long, oily hair and a shirt half open and a long

earring and bad teeth and he’s aloof and cold to you; and then

suddenly, so fast it didn’t happen, there’s a big, warm hand on

your hand, a big, hairy hand, and he’s squeezing your fingers

around the two dollars and he’s half smiling, one half o f his

face is smiling, and he says darling take a fucking cab. Y ou

stare at him but you can’t exactly see him; his face ain’t all in

one piece; it’s sort o f split and moving; and before you exactly

see his mouth move and hook it up with his words he’s gone,

w ay to a foreign country, the other end o f the bar where

they’re having bourbon, some cowboys with beards and hats.

Life’s always kind in a pinch. The universe opens up with a

gift. There’s generosity, someone gives you something special

you need; two dollars and you don’t have to suck nothing, you

are saved and the man in his generosity stirs you deeply.

Y o u ’re inspired to succeed with the rest o f the plan— move,

stand, walk, execute each detail o f the plan with a military

precision, although you wish you could take o ff your T-shirt

because it’s very hot but you follow the plan you made in your

mind and although your legs buckle and the ground isn’t solid,

it’s swelling and heaving, you make it past the strange, w avy

creatures with the deep baritone voices and the erections and

you get out, you get out the door even though it’s hard and

yo u ’re afraid because you can see outside that it’s raining, it’s

raining very hard, it’s pouring down, it’s so wet, you really

have an aversion to it because all your clothes will be drenched

and soaking and your lungs will be wet and your bones will

get all damp and wet and you can’t really see very well and the

rain’s too heavy and everything looks different from before

and you can’t really see through the rain and it’s getting in

your eyes as if your eyes are under water and burning, all

drowned in water, they hurt, and everything’s blurred and

your hair’s all wet as if it w o n ’t ever be dry again and there’s

water in your ears deep down and it hurts and everything's

chilly and wet. The w o rld ’s wet and watery and without

definition and without any fixed places o f reference or fixed

signs and it’s as if the city’s floating by you, like some flood

uprooted everything and it’s loose on the rapids and everywhere you step you are in a flood o f racing cold water. Y ou r feet are all wet and your legs are all wet and you squoosh in

your boots and all your clothes are soaked through and you are

dripping so much that it is as if you yourself are raining,

w ater’s flooding o ff you and it’s useless to be a person with

legs who counts on solid ground because here you have to

walk through water, which isn’t easy, yo u ’re supposed to

sw im through it but there’s not enough to swim through and

there’s too much to walk through, it’s as if yo u ’re glued and

gum m y and loose and the ground’s loose and the water’s loose

and yo u ’re breathing in water as much as air and you feel like

some fucking turkey that’s going to drow n in the rain; which

probably you will. Y o u ’re trying to walk home and it’s been a

long time, the old trick o f putting one foot in front o f the other

doesn’t seem to be working and you don’t seem to have got

very far but it’s hard to tell since nothing looks right or

familiar and everything’s under water and blurry and yo u ’re

cold and sort o f fixed in place because the w ater’s weighing

you down, kind o f making you so heavy you can’t really m ove

as i f yo u ’re an earthbound person m oving effortlessly through

air as is the case with normal people on normal days because it

ain’t air, it’s water. Y o u ’re all wet as if you was naked and your

clothes are wet and heavy as if they was lead and your breasts

are sore from the wet and the cold and your pubic hair’s all

wet and rubbing up against the wet stu ff all bunched up in

your crotch and there’s rain rolling down your legs and

com ing out the bottom o f your pants and yo u ’d be happier

naked, wet and naked, because the clothes feel very bad on

you, wet and bad. T h ey’re heavy and nasty and cold. The

m oney’s in your hand and it’s all wet, all rained out, soaking

wet, and your hand’s clutched, and you try proceeding

through the wet blur, you need to stay on the sidewalks and

you need to avoid oncoming cars and turning cars and crazy

cars that can’t see any better than you and you need to see the

traffic lights and you need to see what’s in front o f you and

w hat’s on the side o f you and what’s behind you, just as on any

regular day, and at night even more; but you can’t see and the

rain keeps you from hearing as well and you proceed slow ly

and you don’t get too far; it’s been a long time you been out

here and you haven’t gone but half a block and you are

drenched in water and breathing too fast and breathing too

hard and your legs aren’t carrying you right and the ground’s

not staying still and the water’s pushing you from behind and

it’d like to flatten you out and roll over you, and it ain’t nice

lapping against the calves o f your legs; and a cab stops; which

you have barely ever ridden in before, not on your own; it

stops; you’ve been in them when someone’s given you money

to deliver packages and said where to go and exactly what to

do and how much it would cost and still you were scared it

would cost too much and you wouldn’t have it and something

terrible would happen; a cab stops and you don’t know if two

dollars is enough or if he thinks you’re turning tricks, a dumb

wet whore, or if he just wants to fuck or if you could get inside

and he’d just take you home, a passenger; a cab stops and

yo u ’re afraid to get in because you’re not a person who rides in

cabs even in extremis even though you have two dollars and

it’s for taking a cab as the bartender said if you didn’t dream it

and probably he knows how much everything costs; a cab

stops; and yo u ’re wet; and you want to go home; and if you

got in the cab you could be home almost right away, very

close to right away, you could be home in just some few

minutes instead o f a very long time, because if you walk you

don’t know how long it will take or how tired yo u ’ll be and

you could get so tired you just stop somewhere to give up, a

doorw ay, an abandoned car, or even if you keep going it will

take a long time; and i f you got in the cab you could sit still for

a few minutes in perfect dignity and it would be dry and quiet

and you would be in the back, a passenger, and you could

ju m p if he pulled shit, if he started driving wild or going

somewhere strange, and yo u ’d give him the tw o dollars and

he’d take you home, and you get in the cab, it’s dark and

leather and yo u ’re scared about the m oney so you say upfront

that you only got two dollars and he asks where yo u ’re going

and you say and he says fine, it’s fine, it’s okay, it’s no

problem, and he says it’s raining and you say yeah, it is; and he

says some quiet, simple things, like sometimes it rains too

hard, and you say yes; he’s quiet and softspoken and there’s

long, curly hair cascading down his back and he says that I’m

wet with some sym pathy and I say yes I am; and he asks me

what I do in a quiet and sympathetic w ay and I say I’m a writer;

and he says he’s a musician, very quiet, nice; and I say I drank

too much, I was writing and I got restless and I got drunk and

he says yes he knows what that’s like, very quiet, very nice,

he’s done it too, everyone does it sometimes, but he doesn’t

keep talking, he’s very quiet, he talks soft, not a lot, and there’s

quiet moments and I think he’s pretty nice and I’m trying to

watch the streets to see where we are and w e’re going towards

where I live but up and down blocks, it doesn’t seem direct but

I don’t know because I don’t drive and I don’t know if there’s

one-w ay streets and the meter’s o ff anyw ay and he’s English

like in films with a distinguished accent, sort o f tough like

Albert Finney but he talks quiet and nice, a little dissonant; he’s

sort o f slim and delicate, you know how pretty a man can be

when he’s got fine features, chiseled, and curls, and he’s sort o f

waif-like, kind o f like a child in Dickens, appealing with a pull

to the heart, street pretty but softspoken, not quite hard, not

apparently cynical, not a regular N ew Y ork taxi driver as I’ve

seen them, all squat and old, but graceful, lithe, slight, young,

younger than me probably, new, not quite used but not

untouched, virginal but available, you can have him but it isn’t

quite right to touch him, he’s withdrawn and aloof and it

appears as a form o f refinement, he’s delicate and finely made,

you wonder what it would be like to touch him or if he’d be

charmed enough to touch you back, it’s a beauty without

prettiness except this one’s pretty too, too pretty for me, I

think, I never had such a pretty, delicate boy put together so

fine, pale, the face o f an old, inbred race, now decadent,

fragile, bloodless, with the heartrending beauty o f fine old

bones put together delicately, reconstructed under glass, it

w ouldn’t really be right to touch it but still you want to, just

touch it; and you couldn’t really stop looking at him in the

m irror o f the taxi, all the parts o f his face barely hang together,

all the parts are fragile and thin, it’s delicate features and an

attitude, charm and insouciance but with reserve, he puts out

and he holds back, he decides, he’s used to being wanted, he’s

aloof, or is it polite, or is it gentle? He turns around and smiles

and it’s like angel dust; I’m dusted. I get all girlish and

embarrassed and I think, really, he’s too pretty, he doesn’t

mean it, and there’s a real tense quiet and we drive and then he

stops and w e’re there and I hand him the two dollars because

we agreed and he says real quiet, maybe I could come in, and I

say yes, and I’m thinking he’s so pretty, it’s like being in a

m ovie with some movie star you have a crush on only he’s

coming with you and it’s not in a movie but you know how a

crush on someone in a film makes you crazy, so weird, as if

you could really touch him even though he’s flat and on film

and the strange need you think you have for him and the things

you think you would do with him, those are the feelings,

because I have a stupid crush, an insane crush, a boy-crazy

crush, and I am thinking this is a gorgeous night with the

visitation o f this fine boy but I am so fucking drunk I can

barely get up the steps and I think he’ll turn around and go

because it can’t be nice for him and now he can see how drunk;

smashed; as if I got Stoli pumping through m y heart and it’s

fumes I’m inhaling, fumes rising out o f m y ow n veins or rising

from m y chest, like a fog rising out o f m y chest, and I am

falling down drunk and such a fool, in m y heart I am romantic

for him, all desire and affection verging on an impolite

hunger, raw, greedy, now, now, but there’s m y beautiful

dog, m y very gorgeous and fine dog, m y heart, m y beast o f

jo y and love, m y heart and soul, m y friend on romps and good

times around the block, and she’s jum ping up and down and

she’s licking me and she’s jum ping all over me and it makes me

fall and I say I have to walk her because I do, I must, she’s got

rights, I explain, I have this idea she’s got rights, and I think he

will leave now but he says, very quiet and nice, oh I’ll walk

her, you ju st lie here, and I am flat out drunk, laid out drunk,

flat and drunk on m y bed, a mattress on the floor, barely a

mattress, a cut piece o f foam rubber, hard and flat, it’s an

austere bed for serious solitude or serious sex and I am fucking

stretched out and the walls move, a fast circle dance, and he

takes her leash and they leave and I’m smiling but time goes by

and I get scared, I start waiting, I start feeling time brushing by

me, I start thinking I will never see m y dog again and I think

what have I done and I think I will die from losing her if he

doesn’t bring her back and I think I have to call the police or I

have to follow him and find him or I have to get up and get out

and call to her and I think about life without her if she were

gone and I’d die and I try to m ove an arm but I can’t m ove it

and there’s a pain coming into m y heart which says I am a pale

shadow o f what you will feel the rest o f your life if she’s gone,

it says yo u ’ll mourn the rest o f your life and there’s a grief that

will burn up your insides and leave them just bare and burned

and em pty, burned ugly and barren, obliterated; and I know

that if she’s gone I’m going to pull m yself to pieces, pull my

mind apart, tear m yself open, rend my breast, turn m y heart to

sackcloth, make ashes out o f m y heart; if she’s gone I’m lost; a

wanderer in madness and pain; despondent; a vagabond

turned loose one last time, sad enough to turn the world to

hell; I’ll touch it, anything before me, and make it hell. I will

rage on these streets a lifetime and I will build fires from

garbage in buildings and I will hurt men; for the rest o f my

time here on earth, I will hurt them. I will wander and I will

wail and I will break bottles to have shards o f glass I can hold in

m y hand so they cut both ways, instead o f knives, I’ll bleed

they will bleed both at the same time, the famous two-edged

sword, I will use them on curly-haired boys and I will keep on

after death and I will never stop because the pain will never

stop and you w on’t be able to erase me from these streets, I

will sweep down like lightning except it will be a streak o f

blood from the shard o f glass that cuts both ways, and I will

find one and he will bleed. I’ve got this living brain but my

body’s dead, w on’t move, it’s inert, paralyzed, couldn’t move

to save me or her but once I can move I will begin the search, I

will find her, my dog; without her, there’s no love. It’s as if I

drank some poison that’s killed my muscles so they can’t

m ove and time’s going by and I’m counting it, the minutes,

and I’m waiting, and m y heart is filling up with pain, suffering

is coming upon me; and remorse; because I did it, this awful

thing that made this awful loss. Then they’re there, him and

her, and she’s laughing and playing with her leash and he’s

smiling and happy and I’m thinking he’s beautiful, inside too,

in spirit, and I am near dying to touch him, I want to make real

love, arduous, infatuated love touched by his grace, and I’m

wondering what he will be like, naked and fine, intense, first

slow, now; and I reach for him and he pulls me up so I’m on

m y knees in front o f him and he’s standing on the mattress and

he takes his cock out and I’m thinking I’ll hold it and he wants

it in m y mouth and I’m thinking I will kiss it and lick it and

hold it in m y mouth and undress him as I do it and I’m

thinking how happy and fine this will be, slow, how stopped

in time and tender, he holds m y head still by m y hair and he

pushes his cock to the bottom o f m y throat, rams it in, past m y

throat, under it, deeper than the bottom, I feel this fracturing

pain as if m y neck shattered from inside and m y muscles were

torn apart ragged and fast, an explosion that ripped them like a

bomb went o ff or someone pushed a fist down m y throat but

fast, just rammed it down, and I feel surprise, this one second

o f complete surprise in which, without words, I want to know

the meaning o f this, his intention; there’s one second o f

awesome, shocking surprise and then I go under, it’s black,

there’s nothing, coma, death, complete black under the

ground or past life altogether in a region o f nothing without

shadows o f life or m em ory or dreams or fear or time, there’s

nothing, it’s perfect, cold, absolute nothing. When I wake up I

think I am dead. I begin to see the walls, barely, I barely see

them, and I see I’m in a room like the room I was in when I was

alive and I think this is what death is like, the same but yo u ’re

dead, the same but you stay here forever alone, the same walls

but you barely see them and the same place where you died,

the same body, but it’s not real, it’s not alive, it doesn’t feel

real, it’s cold and shadowy and yo u ’re there alone for all the

rest o f time cut o ff from the living and it’s empty, your d o g’s

not here in the room in death, in the cold, shaky, shadowy

room, it’s an imitation in shadows o f where you were but it’s

em pty o f her and you will be here alone forever, lonely for her,

there’s no puppies with the dead, no solace; you wake up and

you know yo u ’re dead; and alone. O nly m y eyes m ove but

they barely see, the walls look the same but I barely see them;

tim e’s nothing here; it stands still; it’s not changing, never;

yo u ’re like a m um m y but with m oving eyes scanning the

shadowy walls, but barely seeing them; and then the pain

comes; the astonishing pain, like someone skinned the inside

o f your throat, took a knife and lifted the skin o ff inside so it’s

raw, all blood, all torn, the muscles are ripped open, ragged,

stretched and pulled, you’re all ripped up inside as if you had

been torn apart inside and under your throat there’s a deep pain

as if it’s been deep cut, deep sliced, as if there’s some deadly

sickness down there, a contagion o f long-suffering death, an

awful illness, a soreness that verges on having all the nerves in

your body up under your throat and someone’s crushed

broken glass into them and there’s a physical anguish as if

someone poured gasoline down your throat and lit it; an

eternal fire; deep fire; deep pain. I felt the pain, and as the pain

got sharper and deeper and stronger and meaner, the walls got

clearer, I saw them clearer and they stayed still, and as the pain

got worse, crueler, I could feel the bed under me and m y old

drunk body and I figured out that I was probably alive and

time had passed and I must o f been out, in a coma,

unconscious, suspended in nothing except whatever’s cold

and black past actual life, and I couldn’t move and I wanted my

dog but I couldn’t call out for her or make any sound, even a

rasping sound, and I couldn’t raise m yself up to see where she

was although in m y mind I could see her all curled up in her

corner o f the room at the foot o f the mattress, being good,

being quiet, how she curled her head around to her tail and the

sweet, sad look on her face, how she’d just sit thinking with

her sweet, melancholy look and I hoped she’d come and lick

me and I wondered if she needed to be walked again yet but if

she did she’d be around me and I’d manage it, I swear I would,

and I wondered if she was hungry yet and I made a promise in

m y heart never to put her in danger with a stranger again, with

an unknown person, never to take a chance with her again, I

couldn’t understand what kind o f a man it was because it

wasn’t on m y map o f the world and I ain’t got a child’s map, did

he like it, to ram it down to kill me, a half second brutality o f

something o ff the map that didn’t even exist anywhere even

between men and wom en or with Nazis; and I don’t know if

he did other things, I can’t feel nothing or smell nothing, he

could have done anything, I don’t feel nothing near m y

vagina, I try to feel with m y fingers, if it’s wet, if it’s dirty, i f it

hurts, but everything’s numb except m y throat, the hurt o f it,

I’m thinking he could have done anything, fucked me or

masturbated on me or peed on me, I w ouldn’t know , I’m

feeling for semen or wet places with m y fingers but I can’t

m ove because m y throat can’t m ove or the pain implodes,

there can’t be a single tremor even, I can’t lift m yself up and I

know I’ll never know and I push it out o f m y mind, that I will

never know; I push it out and I am pulled under by the pain

because m y throat’s crushed into broken bits and it’s lit with

kerosene and the fire’s spreading up m y neck to m y brain, a

spreading field o f fire going up into m y cranial cavity and it’s

real fire, and probably the pain’s seeping out onto the floor and

spreading, it’s red and bloody or it’s orange and hot; penis

smashed me up; I fall back into the cold, black nothing,

grateful; and later I wake up, it’s night but I don’t know o f

what day except m y dog would’ve come by me, I’d remember

her by me, but I wake up and it’s hollow, m y life’s hollow, I

got an em pty life, I’m alive and it’s empty, she’s gone, I raise

m yself up on m y elbow and I look, I keep looking, there’s a

desolation beyond the burdens o f history, a sadness deeper

than any shame. I’ll take the physical pain, Lord, I deserve it,

double it, triple it, make it more, but bring her back, don’t let

him hurt her, don’t make her gone. I look, I keep looking, I

keep expecting her, that she will be there if I look hard enough

or God will hear me and the boy will walk through the door

saying he ju st walked her and I pray to just let him bring her

back, ju st let him walk in the door; ju st this; days could go by

and I w ouldn’t know ; he’ll be innocent in m y eyes, I swear. I

hallucinate her and I think she’s with me and I reach out and

she’s not real and then I fall back into the deep blackness and

when I wake up I look for her, I wait for her; I’m waiting for

her now. M y throat’s like some small animal nearly killed,

maimed for religious slaughter, a small, nearly killed beast, a

poor warm-blooded thing hurt by some ritual but I never

heard o f the religion, there’s deep sacrifice, deep pain. I can’t

move because the poor thing’d shake near to torture; it’s got to

stay still, the maimed thing. I couldn’t shout and I couldn’t cry

and I couldn’t whisper or moan or call her name, in sighs, I

couldn’t whisper to m yself in sighs. I couldn’t swallow or

breathe. I sat still in m y own shit for some long time, many,

many days, some months o f days, and I rocked, I rocked back

and forth on m y heels, I rocked and I held m yself in m y arms, I

didn’t move more than to rock and I didn’t wash and I didn’t

say nothing. I swallowed down some water as I could stand it,

I breathed when I could, not too much, not too soon, not too

hard. If he put semen on me it’s still there, I wear it, whatever

he did, if he did it I carry it whatever it is, I don’t know, I w on’t

ever know, whatever he did stays done, anything he tore stays

torn, anything he took stays gone. I look for her; I scan the

walls; I stare; I see; I know; I will make m yself into a weapon; I

will turn m yself into a new kind o f death, for them; I got a new

revolutionary love filling my heart; the real passion; the real

thing. Che didn’t know nothing, he was ruling class. Huey killed

a girl, a young prostitute, seventeen; he was pimping but she

wasn’t one o f his. He was cruising, slow, in a car. Baby, she

called out, baby, oh babe. He shot her; no one calls me baby. She

said baby; he said cunt. Some o f them whisper, a term o f

endearment; some o f them shout. There’s gestures more

eloquent than words. She said something, he said something,

she died. Sister child, lost heart, poor girl, I’ll avenge you, sister

o f m y heart. Did it hurt or was death the easy part? I don’t know

what m y one did, except for taking her; but it don’t matter,

really, does it? N ot what; nor why; nor who; nor how.

T E N

April 30, 1974

(Age 27)

Ma. Ssa. Da. Ma. Ssa. Da. Ma. Ssa. Da. Hear m y heart beat.

Massada. I was born there and I died there. There was time;

seventy years. The Je w s were there, the last ones, the last free

ones, seventy years. The zealots, they were called; m y folks,

m y tribe; how I love them in m y heart. N ever give in. N ever

surrender. Slavery is obscene. Die first. B y your ow n hand; if

that’s what it takes; rather than be conquered; die free. N o

shame for the women, they used to say; conquered women;

shame. Massada. I used to see this picture in m y mind, a

wom an on a rock. I wrote about her all the time. Every time I

tried to write a story I wrote there is a woman on a rock, even

in the eighth grade, there’s a woman, a strong woman, a fierce

wom an, on a rock. I didn’t know what happened in the story. I

couldn’t think o f a plot. I just saw her. She was proud. She was

strong. She was wild by our standards or so it seemed, as if

there was no other word; but she didn’t seem wild; because she

was calm; upright; with square shoulders, muscled; her eyes

were big and fearless and looked straight ahead; not like

wom en today, looking down. She was ancient, from an old

time, simple and stark, dirty and dark, austere, a proud,

unconquerable wom an on a rock. The rock towers. The rock

is barren; nothing grow s, nothing erodes, nothing changes; it

is hard and old and massive. The rock is vast. The rock is

majestic, high and bare and alone; so alone the sun nearly

weeps for it; isolated from man and God; unbreachable; a

towering wall o f bare rock, alone in a desert where the sun

makes the sand bleed. The sun is hot, pure, unmediated by

clouds or sky, a white sun; blinding white; no yellow; there’s a

naked rock under a steaming, naked sun, surrounded by

molten, naked sand. It’s a rock made to outlast the desert, a

bare and brazen rock; and the Dead Sea spreads out near it,

below it, touching the edge o f the desert that touches the edge

o f the rock. Dead rock; dead water; a hard land; for a hard

people; God kept killing us, o f course, to make us hard

enough; genocide and slavery and rape were paternal kindnesses designed to build character, to rip pity out o f you, to destroy sentimentality, your heart will be as barren as this rock

when I’m done with you, He said; stern Father, a nasty

Daddy, He made history an incest on His children, slow,

continuous, generation after generation, a sadistic pedagogy,

love and pain, what recourse does a child have? He loves you

with pain, by inflicting it on you, a slow, ardent lover, and you

love back with suffering because you are helpless and human,

an imprisoned child o f Him caged in the world o f His making;

it’s a worshipful response, filled with awe and fear and dread,

bewildered, w hy me, w hy now, w hy this, w hy aren’t Y ou

merciful, w hy aren’t Y ou kind; and because it’s all there is, this

love o f His, it’s the only love He made, the only love He lets us

know, ignorant children shut up in D addy’s house, we yearn

for Him and adore Him and wait for Him, awake, afraid,

shivering; we submit to Him, part fear, part infatuation,

helpless against Him, and we thank Him for the punishment

and the pain and say how it shows He loves us, we say Daddy,

Daddy, please, begging Him to stop but He takes it as

seduction, it eggs Him on, He sticks it in; please, Daddy. He

didn’t rest on the seventh day but He didn’t write it down

either, He made love, annihilation is how I will love them.

Y ou might say He had this thought. It was outside the plan.

The six days were the plan. On the seventh He stretched

H im self out to take a big snooze and a picture flashed through

His mind, a dirty picture, annihilation is how I will love them,

and it made everything w ork, it made everything hang

together: everything moved. It was like putting the tide in the

ocean. Instead o f a stagnant mass, a big puddle, there was this

monstrous, ruthless thing gliding backwards and forwards at

the same time and underneath the planet broke, there were

fissures and hurricanes and tornadoes and storms o f wind,

great, carnivorous storms; everything moved; moved and

died; moved, killed, and died. On the seventh day He made

love; annihilation is how I will love them; it was perfect and

Creation came alive animated by the nightmare o f His perfect

love; and He loved us best; o f all His children, we were the

chosen; D addy liked fucking us best. That Christ boy found

out; where are Y ou , w hy have Y o u forsaken me; common

questions asked by all the fucked children loved to death by

Daddy. At Massada we already knew what He wanted and

how He wanted it, He gloried in blood. We were His perfect

children; we made our hearts as bare and hard and empty as the

rock itself; good students, emblematic Jew s; pride was

prophecy. N early two thousand years later w e’d take Palestine

back, our hearts burned bare, a collective heart chastened by

the fire o f the crematoria; empty, hard. Pride, the euphemism

for the emotions that drove us to kill ourselves in a mass

suicide at Massada, the nationalist euphemism, was simple

obedience. We knew the meaning o f the H oly Books, the

stories o f His love, the narrative details o f His omnipresent

embrace; His wrath, orgasmic, a graphic, calculating

treachery. Freedom meant escape from Him; bolting into

death; a desperate, determined run from His tormenting love;

the Romans were His surrogates, the agents o f slavery and

rape, puppets on the divine string. It was the play within the

play; they too suffered; He loved them too; they too were

children o f God; He toyed with them too; but we were

D addy’s favorite girl. We had the holy scrolls; and a

synagogue that faced towards Jerusalem, His city, cruel as is

befitting; perpetual murder, as is befitting. The suicide at

Massada was us, His best children, formed by His perfect

love, surrendering: to Him. Annihilation is how I will love

them; He loved loving; the freedom for us was the end o f the

affair, finally dead. Yeah, we defied the Romans, a righteous

suicide it seemed; but that was barely the point; we weren’t

prepared to have them on top, we belonged to Him.

Everything was hidden under the floor o f a cell that we had

sealed off; to protect the holy scrolls from Roman desecration;

to protect the synagogue from Roman desecration; we kept

His artifacts pure and hidden, the signs and symbols o f His

love; we died, staying faithful; only Daddy gets to hurt us bad;

only Daddy gets to put His thing there. First we burned

everything we had, food, clothes, everything; we gathered it

all and we burned it. Then ten men were picked by lot and they

slit the throats o f everyone else. Then one man was chosen by

lot and he slit the throats o f the other nine, then his own. I have

no doubt that he did. There were nearly a thousand o f us; nine

hundred and sixty; men, women, children; proud; obedient to

God. There was discipline and calm, a sadness, a quiet

patience, a tense but quiet waiting for slaughter, like at night,

how a child stays awake, waiting, there is a stunning courage,

she does not run, she does not die o f fear. Some were afraid

and they were held down and forced, o f course; it had to be. It

was by family, mostly. A husband lay with his wife and

children, restrained them, their throats were slit first, then his,

he held them down, tenderly or not, and then he bared his

throat, deluded, thinking it was manly, and there was blood,

the w ay God likes it. There were some w idow s, some

orphans, some lone folks you didn’t especially notice on a

regular day; but that night they stood out; the men with the

swords did them first. It took a long time, it’s hard to kill nearly

a thousand people one by one, by hand, and they had to hurry

because it had to be done before dawn, you can do anything in

the dark but dawn comes and it’s hard to look at love in the

light. We loved God and we loved freedom, we were all G o d ’s

girls you might say and freedom, then as now, was in getting

sliced; a perfect penetration, then death; a voluptuous compliance, blood, death. I f yo u ’re G o d ’s girl you do it the w ay He likes it and H e’s got special tastes; the naked throat and the

thing that tears it open, He likes one clean cut, a sharp, clean

blade; you lay yourself down and the blade cuts into you and

there’s blood and pain; and the eyes, there’s a naked terror in

the eyes and death freezes it there, yo u ’ve seen the eyes. The

blood is warm and it spreads down over you and you feel its

heat, you feel the heat spreading. Freedom isn’t abstract, an

idea, it’s concrete, in life, a sliced throat, a clean blade,

freedom now. G o d ’s girl surrenders and finds freedom where

the men always bragged it was; in blood and death; only they

didn’t expect it to be this w ay, them on their backs too, supine,

girlish; G o d ’s the man here. There’s an esthetic to it too, o f

course: the bodies in voluntary repose, waiting; the big knife,

slicing; the rich, textured beauty o f the anguish against the

amorphous simplicity o f the blood; the emotions disciplined

to submission as murder comes nearer, the blood o f someone

covers your arm or your shoulder or your hand and the glint o f

the blade passes in front o f your eyes and you push your head

back to bare your throat, slow ly so that you will live longer

but it looks sensual and lewd and filled with longing, and he

cuts and you feel the heat spreading, your body cools fast,

before you die, and you feel the heat o f your own blood

spreading. Was Sade God? M aybe I was just seventy; I was

born on the rock but the adults who raised me were new to it

and awkward, not native to the rock, still with roots down

below, on softer ground; I died there, a tough one, old, tough

skin from the awful sun, thick and leathery, with deep furrow s

like dried up streams going up my legs and up my arms and

creasing m y face, scarified you might say from the sun eating

up m y skin, cutting into it with white hot light, ritual scars or a

surgeon’s knife, terrible, deep rivers in my skin, dried out

rivers; and maybe I’d had all the men, religion notwithstanding, men are always the same, filled with God and Law but still

sticking it in so long as it’s dark and fast; no place on earth

darker than Massada at night; no boys on earth faster than the

Jew s; nice boys they were, too, scholars with the hearts o f

assassins. Beware o f religious scholars who learn to fight.

T h ey’ve been studying the morals o f a genocidal God. Shrewd

and ruthless, smart and cruel, they will win; tell me, did

Massada ever die and where are the Romans now; profiles on

coins in museums. A scholar who kills considers the long

view; will the dead survive in every tear the living shed? A

scholar knows how it will look in writing; beyond the death

count o f the moment. Regular soldiers who fight to kill don’t

stand a chance. The corpses o f all sides get maggots and turn to

dust; but some stories live forever, pristine, in the hidden

heart. They prayed, the Jew ish boys, they made forays down

the rock to fight the Romans until the military strength o f the

Romans around the rock was unassailable, they took a little

extra on the side when they could get it, like all men. I

probably had m y eye on the younger ones, twenty, virile,

new, they had no m emory o f being Jew s down on the low

ground, they had only this austere existence, they were born

here o f parents who were born here o f parents who either were

born here or came here young and lived their adult years on

this rock. Sometimes Jew s escaped the Romans and got here,

made it to the top; but they didn’t bring profane ideas; they

stripped themselves o f the foreign culture, the habits o f the

invaders; they told us stories o f Roman barbarism, which

convinced us even more; down below the Romans were pigs

rolling in shit, above we were the people o f God. N o one here

doubted it, especially not the young men; they were pure,

glow ing, vibrant animals lit up by a nationalism that enhanced

their physical beauty, it was a single-minded strength. There

were no distracting, tantalizing memories o f before, below.

We lived without the tumult o f social heterodoxy, there was

no cultural relativism as it were. The young men were hard,

cold animals, full o f self-referential pride; they had no

ambivalence, no doubt; they had true grit and were incapable

o f remorse; they lived in a small, contained world, geographically limited, flat, all the same, barren, culturally

dogmatic, they had a few facts, they learned dogma by rote, it

was a closed system, they had no need for introspection, there

were no moral dilemmas that confronted them, troubled

them, pulled them apart inside; they were strong, they fought,

they prayed but it was a form o f nationalism, they learned

racial pride, they had the thighs o f warriors, not scholars, and

they used them on women, not Romans, it was the common

kind o f killing, man on girl, as i f by being Jew s alone on this

desolate rock, isolated here, they were, finally, like everyone

else, all the other men, ordinary, like Romans, for instance;

making war on us, brutal and quick if not violent, but they

beat women too, the truth, finally, they did. The sacred was

remote from them except as a source o f national pride; pure

Je w s on a purely Jew ish rock they had a pure God o f the Jew s,

His laws, H oly Books, the artifacts o f a pure and superior

nation. The rock was barren and empty and soon it would be a

cemetery and the bloodletting would become a story; nearly

fiction, nearly a lie; abridged, condensed, cleaned up; as if

killing nine hundred and sixty people, men, women, and

children, by slicing their throats was an easy thing, neat and

clean, simple and quiet; as if there was no sex in it and no

meanness; as if no one was forced, held down, shut up; well,

frankly, murdered; as i f no one was murdered; as if it was

noble and perfect, a bloodless death, a murderless murder, a

mass suicide with universal consent, except for the women

and the children; except for them. Y ou get sad, if you

understand. The men were purely male, noble and perfect, in

behalf o f all the Jew s; the young ones especially, strong

animals, real men, prideful men, physically perfect specimens

dark and icy with glistening thighs, ideologically pure,

racially proud, idealists with racial pride; pure, perfect,

uncorrupted nationalists; beautiful fascists; cold killing boys;

until God, ever wise, ever vicious, turned them into girls. I

was probably an old woman making a fool o f herself with

memories and desires, all the natural grace and learned artifice

o f young women burned away by wear and tear and the awful,

hot sun. Still, sometimes you’d like to feel one o f the young

ones against you, a last time, one last time; nasty, brutish,

short. It’s a dumb nostalgia. They never were very good, not

the fathers, not the sons. O r maybe I was some sentimental old

fool w h o ’d always been a faithful wife, except once, I was

lonely and he was urgent, and I had a dozen grandchildren so

this rock knew m y blood already, I had labored here, and now

I sat, old, under the sun, and m y brain got heated with

foresight and grief and I saw them as they soon would be,

corpses with their throats slit, and maybe I howled in pain, an

animal sound, or I denounced them in real words, and the

young men said she’s an old fool, she’s an old idiot, she’s

loony, ignore her, it’s nonsense, and I tried to tell the girls and

the children how they’d be killed soon, with the awful slice

across the throat; these are fanatic boys, I said, driven by an

idea, I said, it is murder, not suicide, what they will do to you;

and they asked if it was the will o f God and o f course now I see

w hy you must lie but I said yes, it’s His will, always, that we

should suffer and die, the will o f God is wrong, I said, we have

to defy the will o f God, we have to defy the Romans and the

Je w s and the will o f God, we have to find a w ay to live, us, you

see, us; she’s loony, they said; you’ll be stretched out, I said,

beautiful and young, too soon, dressed and ornamented, and

your throats will be naked as if your husbands are going to use

your mouths but it will be a sword this time, a real one, not his

obscene bragging, one clean cut, and there will be blood, the

w ay God likes. I didn’t want to see the children die and I was

tired o f God. Enough, I said to Him; enough. I didn’t want to

see the wom en die either, the girls who came after me, you get

old and you see them different, you see how sad their

obedience is, how pitiful; you see them whole and human,

how they could be; you see them chipped aw ay at, broken bit

by bit, slowed down, constrained; tamed; docile; bearing the

weight o f invisible chains; you see it is terrible that they obey

these men, love these men, serve these men, who, like their

God, ruin whatever they touch; don’t believe, I say, don’t

obey, don’t love, let him put the sword in your hand, little

sister, let Him put the sword in your hand; then see. Let him

bare his throat to you; then see. The day before it happened I

quieted down, I didn’t howl, I didn’t rant or rave, I didn’t

want them to lock me up, I wanted to stay out on the rock,

under the hot sun, the hot, white sun; m y companion, the

burning sun. I was an old woman, wild, tough, proud, strong,

illiterate, ah, yes, the people o f the Book, except for the

women and girls, God says it’s forbidden for us, the Book,

illiterate but I wanted to write it down today, quiet, in silence,

not to have to howl but to curl up and make the signs on the

page, to say this is what I know, this is what has happened

here, but I couldn’t write, or read; I was an old woman, tough,

proud, strong, fierce, quiet now as if dumb, a thick quiet, an

intense, disciplined quiet; I was an old woman, wild, tough,

proud, with square shoulders muscled from carrying, from

hard labor, sitting on a rock, a hard, barren rock, a terrible

rock; there was a wom an sitting on a rock, she was strong, she

was fierce, she was wild, she wasn’t afraid, she looked straight

ahead, not down like wom en now , she was dark and dirty,

maybe mad, maybe just old, near naked with rags covering

her, her hair was long and shining and dirty, a gleaming silver

under the hot, white sun; but wild is perhaps not the right

word because she was calm, upright, quiet, in intentional

solitude, her eyes were big and fearless and she faced the world

head-on not averting her eyes the w ay women do now; she

could see; she didn’t turn her eyes away. She was sitting on a

hard, barren rock under a hot, white sun, and then the sun

went down, got lower in the sky, lower and lower yet, a little

lower; the sun got lower and the light got paler, then duller;

the sun got low and she took a piece o f rock, a sharp piece o f

rock, and she cut her throat; I cut my throat. N o Romans; no

fascist Jew ish boys however splendid their thighs or pristine

their ideals; no. Mine was a righteous suicide; a political refusal

to sanction the current order; to say black was white. Theirs

was mass murder. A child can’t commit suicide. You have to

murder a child. I couldn’t watch the children killed; I couldn’t

watch the women taken one last time; throats bared; heads

thrown back, or pushed back, or pulled back; a man gets on

top, who knows what happens next, any time can be the last

time, slow murder or fast, slow rape or fast, eventual death, a

surprise or you are waiting with a welcome, an open

invitation; rape leading, inexorably, to death; on a bare rock,

invasion, blood, and death. Massada; hear my heart beat; hear

me; the women and children were murdered, except me, I was

not, when you say Massada you say m y name, I discovered

pride there, I outlined freedom, out from under, Him and him

and him; let him put the sword in your hand, little sister, then

see; don’t love them; don’t obey. It wasn’t delirium; or fear; I

saw freedom. Does Massada thrill you, do you weep with

pride and sorrow for the honor o f the heroes, the so-called

suicides? Then you weep for me, I make you proud, the

woman on the rock; a pioneer o f freedom; a beginning; for

those who had no say but their throats were ripped open; for

the illiterate in invisible chains; a righteous suicide; a resistance

suicide; mad woman; mad-dog suicide; this girl here’s got a

ripped throat, Andrea, the zealot, freedom is the theory,

suicide the practice; m y story begins at Massada, I begin there,

I see a woman on a rock and I was born in blood, the blood

from her throat carried by time; I was born in blood, the slit

between the legs, the one God did H im self so it bleeds forever,

one clean cut, a perfect penetration, the m emory o f Massada

marked on me, my covenant with her; God sliced me, a

perfect penetration, then left me like carrion for the others, the

ones He made like Him, in His own image as they always say,

as they claim with pride, or vanity I would say, or greed; pride

is me, deciding at Massada, not Him or him or him. Y o u ’re

born in blood, washed in it, you swim out in it, immersed in

it, it’s your first skin, warm , hot on fragile, wrinkled,

discolored flesh; w e’re born to bleed, the ones He sliced

Himself; when the boys come out, the toy boys, tiny figurines

made like Him, He has it done to them, sym bolically, the

penis is sliced so they’re girls to Him; and the toy b o y’ll grow

up pushing the cut thing in girls who are born cut open big,

he’ll need to stick it in and stick it in and stick it in, he doesn’t

like being one o f G o d ’s girls even a little; and it’s a m em ory,

isn’t it, you were girls to M e at Massada; a humiliation; think

o f the last ten, nine o f them on their big knees, throats bared,

one slice, the tenth sticks it up himself, there’s a woman I saw

in a porn magazine, she did that to herself, she smiled; did

number ten, the big hero, smile, a coy look at God, heavy

mascara around the eyes, a wide smile, the sword going in and

som ehow he fingers his crotch at the same time? The

Christians w ouldn’t stand for it; they said C hrist’s the last one,

he died for us so we don’t need to be cut but God wants them

sliced and they know it so they do it for health or sanitation as

if it’s secular garbage removal but in their hearts they know ,

God wants them cut, you don’t get aw ay with not being a girl

for Him except you w on’t be His favorite girl. They take it out

on us, all o f them, sliced or threatened, sliced or evading it,

enlisted or the equivalent o f draft dodgers; manly men;

fucking the hole God already made; He was there first; there

are no virgin girls; the toy boys always get used goods. Their

thing, little next to His, aspires to omnipresence; and Daddy

watches; a perpetual pornography; blood-and-guts scenes o f

pushing and hitting and humiliation, the girl on the bed, the

girl on the floor, the girl in the kitchen, the girl in the car, the

girl down by the river, the girl in the woods, the girls in cities

and towns, prairies and deserts, mountains and plains, all

colors, a rainbow o f suffering, rich and poor, sick and well,

young and old, infants even, a man sticks it in the mouths o f

infants, I know such a man; oh, he’s real; an uncle o f mine; an

adult; look up to him, listen to him, obey him, love him, he’s

your uncle; he was born in Camden but he left, smart, a big

man, he got rich and prominent, an outstanding citizen; five

infants, in the throat, men like the throat, his own children, it

was a daddy’s love, he did that, a loving daddy in the dark, and

God watched, they like the throat, the smooth cavity o f an

infant’s mouth and the tiny throat, a tight passage, men like it

tight, so tiny; and the suction, because an infant sucks, it pulls

and it sucks, it wants food but this food’s too big, too

monstrous, it sucks, it pulls it in, and daddy says to him self it

wouldn’t suck if it didn’t like it; and Daddy watches; and the

infant gags, and the infant retches, and the infant chokes; and

daddy comes; and Daddy comes; the child vomits, chokes,

panics, can’t breathe, forever, a lifetime on the verge o f

suffocation. I don’t have much o f a family, I prefer the streets

frankly to various pieties but sometimes there are these shrieks

in the night, a child quaking from a crime against humanity,

and she calls out, sister she says, he sliced m y throat with a

sword, I remember it but I don’t, it happened but it didn’t, he’s

there in the dark all the time, watching, waiting, he’s a ghost

but he isn’t, it’s a secret but w hy doesn’t everyone know? H ow

does an infant get out from under, Him and him; him; oh, he

does it for a long time, it begins in the crib, then she crawls, a

baby girl and all the relatives go ooh and ah and the proud papa

beams, every night, for years, until the next one is born, two

years, three years, four years, he abandons the child for the

next infant, he likes infants, tiny throat, tight suction,

helpless, tiny, cute thing that seems to spasm whole, you

know how infants crinkle all up, their tiny arms and their tiny

legs, they just all bunch up, one m oving sex part in spasm with

a tight, smooth, warm cavity for his penis, it’s a tiny throat,

and the infant sucks hard, pulls the thing in. Years later there

are small suicides, a long, desperate series o f small suicides,

she’s empty inside except for shadows and dread, sick with

debilitating illnesses, no one knows the cause or the cure, she

chokes, she gags, she vom its, she can’t sw allow; there’s

asthma, anxiety, the nights are saturated with a menace that

feels real, specific, concrete, but you can’t find it when you

turn on the light; and eventually, one day or some day, none o f

us can sw allow ; we choke; we gag; we can’t stop them; they

get in the throat, deep enough in, artists o f torment; a manly

invasion; taking a part God didn’t use first. If yo u ’re adult

before they rape you there yo u ’ve got all the luck; all the luck

there is. The infants; are haunted; by familiar rapists; someone

close; someone known; but who; and there’s the disquieting

certainty that one loves him; loves him. There are these

wom en— such fine women— such beautiful women— smart

women, fine women, quiet, compassionate wom en— and

they want to die; all their lives they have wanted to die; death

would solve it; numb the pain that comes from nowhere but

somewhere; they live in rooms; haunted; by a familiar rapist;

they whisper daddy; daddy, daddy, please; asleep or awake

they want to die, there’s a rapist in the room, the figure o f a

man invading, spectral, supernatural, real but not real, present

but not there; he’s invading; he’s a crushing, smothering

adversary; it’s some fucking middle-class bedroom in some

fucking suburb, there aren’t invading armies here but there’s

invasion, a man advancing on sleeping children, his own;

annihilation is how I will love them; they die in pieces inside;

usually their bodies survive; not always, o f course; you want

God to help them but God w on’t help them, He’s on the other

side; there are sides; the suicides are long and slow, not

righteous, not mass but so lonely, so alone; could we gather up

all the women who were the little girls who were the infants

and say do it now, end it now, one time, here; say it was you;

say it happened to you; name names; say his name; we will

have a Massada for girls, a righteous mass suicide, we could

have it on any street corner, cement, bare, hard, empty; but

they’re alone, prisoners in the room with the rapist even after

he’s gone; five infants, uncle; it makes Auschwitz look small,

uncle; deep throat, my uncle invented deep throat, a fine,

upstanding man. I can do the arithmetic; five equals six

million; uncle pig; uncle good Jew ; uncle upstanding citizen;

uncle killer fucking pig; but we have a heroic tradition o f

slaughtering children in the throat; feel the pride. I’ll gather

them up and show you a righteous suicide; in Camden; home;

bare, hard, empty cement, hard, gray cement, cement spread

out like desert rock, cement under a darker sun, a brooding

sun, a bloody sun, covered over, burgundy melting, a wash o f

blood over it; even the sun can’t watch anymore. There were

brick houses the color o f blood; on hard, gray rock; we come

from there, uncle, you and I, you before me, the adult; you

raped your babies in pretty houses, rich rooms; escaped the

cement; they threw me down on the cement and took me from

behind; but I’ll bet you never touched a girl when you were a

homeboy, slob; too big for you, even then, near your own

size; w e’ll have Massada in Camden, a desolate city, empty

and bare and hard as a rock; and I will have the sword in m y

hand and I will kill you myself; you will get down on your big

knees and you will bare your throat and I will slice it; a suicide;

he killed himself, the w ay they did at Massada; only this time a

girl had the sword; and it was against God, not to placate Him.

Every bare, empty, hard place spawns a you, uncle, and a me;

homeboy, there’s me and you. The shit escaped; into death;

the shit ran away; died; escaped to the safe place for bandits,

the final hideaway where God the Father protects His gang;

they watch together now, Father and His boy, a prodigal son,

known in the world o f business for being inventive, a genius

o f sorts, known among infants as a genius; o f torment;

destruction; and I’m the avenging angel, they picked me, the

infants grew up and they picked me; they knew it would take a

Camden girl to beat a homeboy; you had to know the cement,

the bare, em pty rock; he was a skeleton when he died, illness

devoured him but it w asn’t enough, how could it be enough,

w hat’s enough for the Him mler o f the throat? I know how to

kill them; I think them dead for a long time; I make them waste

away; for a long time; I don’t have to touch them; I ju st have to

know who they are; uncle, the infants told me; I knew. I was

born in Camden in 1946 down the street from Walt Whitman,

an innocent boy, a dreamer, one o f G o d ’s sillier creatures, put

on earth as a diversion, a kind o f decoy, kind o f a lyrical phony

front in a covert war, a clever trick by rape’s best strategist, he

had G od-given talent for G od-given propaganda; the poet

says love; as command; the w ay others say sit to a dog; love,

children, love; or love children; the poet advocates universal

passion; as command; no limits; no rightful disdain; humanity

itself surges, there is a sweep o f humanity, we are waves o f

ecstasy, the common man, and woman, when he remembers

to add her; embrace the common man; we are a human fam ily

consecrated to love, each individual an imperial presence in the

climactic collective, a sovereign unto himself; touch each

other, without fear, and he, Walt, w ill touch everyone; every

one o f us; we all get loved by him, rolled up in him, rolled over

by him; his thighs embrace us; he births us and he fucks us, a

patriarch’s vision, we take him in our mouths, grateful; he

used words to paint great dreams, visionary wet dreams,

dem ocracy’s wet dreams; for the worker and the whore; each

and all loved by him; and in his stead, as he’s busy writing

poems, all these others, the common men, push it in and

come; I loved him, the words, the dreams; don’t believe them,

don’t love them, don’t obey the program written into the

poem, a series o f orders from the high commander o f pain;

bare the throat, spread the legs, suck the thing; only he was

shy, a nineteenth-century man, they didn’t say it outright

then; he said he wanted everyone, to have them, in the poems;

he wanted to stick it in everywhere; and be held too, the lover

who needs you, your compassion, a hint o f recognition from

you, a tenderness from your heart, personal and singular; the

pitiful readers celebrate the lyric and practice the program, the

underlying communication, the orders couched in language as

orgasmic as the acts he didn’t specifically say; he was lover,

demanding lover, and father; he spread his seed everywhere,

over continents; as i f his ejaculation were the essence o f love; as

i f he reproduced him self each time; with his hand he made

giants; as if we all were his creatures; as i f his sperm had

washed over the whole world and he begat us, and now he’d

take us; another maniac patriarch, a chip o ff the old block; the

epic drama o f a vast possession as i f it were an orgy o f

brotherly love, kind, tender, fraternite; as if taking everyone

were gentle, virile but magnanimous, a charity from body to

body, soul to soul; none were exempt, he was the poet o f

inclusion; you could learn there were no limits, though you

might not know the meaning until after they had touched you,

all o f them, his magnificent masses, each one; you could stay

as innocent, or nearly, as the great, gray poet himself, until

yo u ’d done the program; then you’d be garbage somewhere,

your body literal trash, without the dignity o f a body bag,

something thrown out, dumped somewhere, sticky from

sperm, ripped inside, a torn anus, vaginal bruises and tears, a

ripped throat; the tissue is torn; there’s trauma to the tissue,

says the doctor, detached, not particularly interested; but the

tissue is flesh, o f a human, and the trauma is injury, o f a

human, the delicate lining o f the vagina is flesh, the interior

lining o f the throat is flesh, not meant for invasion, assault;

flesh lines the anus; it’s already limned with cracks and

bleeding sores; mortal fools bleed there, we are dying all the

time; lo ve’s intense and there will be great, jagged rips, a

searing pain, it burns, it bleeds, there are fistfuls o f blood,

valleys o f injury too wide and too deep to heal, and the shit

comes out, like a child, bathed in blood, and there’s fire, the

penis pushed in hard all at once for the sake o f the pain, because

the lover, he likes it; annihilation is how I will love them.

Y o u ’ll just be loved to death, tears, like cuts, and tears, the

w atery things; it wasn’t called the C ivil War, or Vietnam; it

w asn’t a w ar poets decried in lyrics apocalyptic or austere,

they couldn’t ever see the death, or the wounded soldier, or

the evil o f invasion, a genocidal policy if I remember right, it’s

hard to remember; love’s celebrated; it’s party time; hang

them from the rafters, the loved ones, pieces o f meat, nice and

raw, after the dogs have had them, clawed them to pieces,

chewed on their bones; bloody, dirty pieces strung out on

street corners or locked up in the rapist’s house. One whole

human being was never lost in all o f history or all o f time; or

not so a poet could see it or use fine words to say it. Walt sings;

to cover up the crimes; say it’s love enough; enough. And art’s

an alibi; I didn’t do it, I’m an artist; or I did do it but it’s art,

because I’m an artist, we do art, not rape, I did it beautiful, I

arranged the pieces so esthetic, so divine; and them that love

art also did not do it; I support art. Walt could sing, all right;

obscuring a formal truth; as if a wom an had an analogous

throat; for song; then they stuff it down; sing then darling.

The poems were formal lies; lies o f form; bedrock lies; as if the

throat, pure but incarnate, was for singing in this universal

humanity we have here, this democracy o f love, for one and

all; but they stuff it down; then try singing; sing, Amerika,

sing. I saw this Lovelace girl. I’m walking in Times Square,

going through the trash cans for food; I roam now, every day,

all the time, days, nights, I don’t need sleep, I don’t ever sleep;

I’m there, digging through the slop for some edible things but

not vegetables because I never liked vegetables and there’s

standards you have to keep, as to your own particular tastes. I

am searching for my dog, my precious friend, on every city

street, in every alley, in every hole they got here where usually

there’s people, in every shooting gallery, in every pim p’s

hallway, in every abandoned building in this city, I am

searching, because she is my precious friend; but so far I have

not found her; it’s a quest I am on, like in fables and stories,

seeking her; and if m y heart is pure I will find her; I remember

Gawain and Galahad and I try to survive the many trials

necessary before finding her and I am hoping she wasn’t taken

to wicked, evil ones; that she’s protected by some good magic

so she w on ’t be hurt or malnourished or used bad, treated

mean, locked up or starved or kicked; I’m hoping there’s a

person, half magic, who will have regard for her; and after I’ve

done all the trials and tribulations she will come to me in a dark

wood. I’ve got pain, in m y throat, some boy tore it up, I rasp, I

barely talk, it’s an ugly sound, some boy killed it, as if it were

some small animal he had to maim to death, an enemy he had

to kill by a special method, you rip it up and it bleeds and the

small thing dies slow. It’s a small, tight passage, good for fun,

they like it because it’s tight, it hugs the penis, there’s no give,

the muscles don’t stretch, at some point the muscles tear, and

it must be spectacular, when they rip; then he’d come; then

he’d run. Y ou couldn’t push a baby through, like with the

vagina; though they’d probably think it’d be good for a laugh;

have some slasher do a cesarean; like with this Lovelace girl,

where they made a jo k e with her, as if the clit is in her throat

and they keep pushing penises in to find it so she can have an

orgasm; it’s for her, o f course; always for her; a joke; but a

friendly one; for her; so she can have a good time; I went in,

and I saw them ram it down; big men; banging; you know,

mean shoving; I don’t know w hy she ain’t dead. They kept her

smiling; i f it’s a film you have to smile; I wanted to see if it

hurt, like with me; she smiled; but with film they edit, you

know, like in H ollyw ood. She had black and blue marks all

over her legs and her thighs, big ones, and she smiled; I don’t

know w hy we always smile; I m yself smile; I can remember

smiling, like the smile on a skeleton; you don’t ever want them

to think they did nothing wrong so you smile or you don’t