even when they’re in separate coffins. There’s these girls here,
all behind glass; as if they’re insects you put under glass; you
put morphine to them to knock them out and you mount
them; these weird crawling things, under glass, on display;
Tim es Square’s a zoo, they got women like specimens under
glass; block by city block; cages assembled on cement; under a
darkening sky, the blood’s on it; wind sweeping the garbage
and it’s swirling like dust in a storm; and on display, lit by
neon, they have these creatures, so obscene they barely look
human at all, you never saw a person that looked like them,
including anyone beaten down, including street trash, including anyone raped however many times; because they’re all
painted up and polished as if you had an apple with m aggots
and worm s and someone dipped it in lacquer and said here it is,
beautiful, for you, to eat; it’s as i f their mouths were all swelled
up and as if they was purple between their legs and as if their
breasts were hot-air balloons, not flesh and blood, with skin,
with feeling to the touch, instead it’s a joke, some swollen
joke, a pasted-on gag, what’s so dirty to men about breasts so
they put tassles on them and have them swirl around in circles
and call them the ugliest names; as if they ain’t attached to
human beings; as if they’re party tricks or practical jokes or the
equivalent o f farts, big, vulgar farts; they make them always
deformed; as if there’s real people; citizens; men; with flat
chests, they look down, they see their shoes, a standard for
what a human being is; and there’s these blow-up dolls you
can do things to, they have funny humps on their chests, did
you ever see them swirl, the woman stands there like a dead
puppet, painted, and the balloon things spin. In m y heart I
think these awful painted things are women; like I am still in
m y heart; o f human kind; but the men make them like they’re
two-legged jackasses, astonishing freaks with iron poles up
the middle o f them and someone smeared them with paint,
some psychotic in the loony bin doing art class, and they got
glass eyes with someone’s fingerprints smeared on them; and
they’re all swollen up and hurt, as if they been pushed and
fucked, hit, or stood somewhere in a ring, a circus ring or a
boxing ring, and men just threw things at them, balls and bats
and stones, anything hard that would cause pain and leave
marks, or break bones; they’re swollen up in some places, the
bellies o f starving children but moved up to the breasts and
down to the buttocks, all hunger, water, air, distended; and
then there’s the thin parts, all starved, the bones show, the ribs
sometimes, iridescent skeletons, or the face is caved in under
the paint, the skin collapses because there is no food, only pills,
syringes, Demerol, cocaine, Percodan, heroin, morphine,
there’s hollow cheeks sunk in hollow faces and the w aist’s
