world; m y bed; my place on earth; I will populate the dark
forever, o f course, night is my country, I belong here, I can’t
get free, I was condemned, exiled from daylight because
survival required facing the dark; I am a citizen o f the night,
with a passport, a mouth used enough, it’s vulgar to say but
inside it changes, the skin gets raw and red and it blisters, it
gets small, tight, white blisters, liquidy blisters, it gets tough
and brown, it gets leathery, it sags in loose red places and there
are black-and-blue marks, and your tongue never touches the
ro o f o f your mouth, instead there’s a layer o f slime, sticky
slime, a white, viscous slime, a m oving cement that never
hardens and never disappears, a near mortar o f awful white
stuff, mucous and slime; you got a mouth crawling on top
with slime; as if it’s worms in you, spermy little worm things
all laid out side by side all in a line lining the ro o f o f your
mouth; a protein shield, if you want to put the best construction on it, because you don’t want his shit shooting to the top
o f your brain anyway, going through the ro of o f your mouth
to your head, you don’t want his molecules absorbed in your
brain, planted there so his molecular reality grow s in some
hemisphere o f your brain, you don’t want him as weeds in
your head, with his D . N . A. rolling all over behind your eyes;
and o f course you try to keep him as high in your mouth as you
can, as close to the front, as little in; always give as little as you
can; not just on principle, as in, give as little o f anything as you
can; but you give as little o f yourself as you can in a literal
sense, not as an abstract concept o f self but as little o f your
mouth as you can; except for the one who rammed it down to
the bottom, into your chest or your lungs or however far he
got, he shattered muscles as if they was glass, splintered them
as i f they was bone, you could feel a smashed larynx
swim m ing in blood, like a dead animal, all bleeding and cut
open, I got a sexy voice now, something hoarse and missing,
an absence, a bare vibration; but he w asn’t a trick, he was a
cute boy, true love and real romance, remember him I instruct
m yself because it’s hard, rape’s hard, remem bering’s hard,
they have to break so much there’s no deep deep enough to
bury it in, they leave you with crushed bones, diced nerves,
live nerves, sliced nerves as if someone took a knife to the
nerve endings themselves, not so they are cut dead but so they
are being sliced each minute o f forever, and they don’t go
dead, there’s not half a second o f numbness or paralysis, the
nerves are open and alive and being hit by the air, exposed, and
the knife is cutting into them thread by thread, they’re stringy
and the knife’s pulling them apart, and you got an acute pain
and a loud scream, high decibels, ringing in your ears, a
torture ringing in your ears, and it don’t let you sleep and you
don’t get forgetfulness, your eyes cry blood and you got open
