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
