Mercy

pretend poets, a different attitude, no poems. Y o u couldn’t get

lost in the dark, it w asn’t dense enough, it w asn’t desolate

enough, it was safe really, a playpen, the fake girls went there

to not get hurt, to have regular boyfriends, to pretend they

were different or bad; but I was really lost so I had to be lost,

not pretend, in a dark as hard and unyielding as the cement

under it. In N ew Y ork I got o ff the bus dank from old Charles,

old Vincent, he walked away, wet, rumpled, not •looking

back, and I had some dollars in my hand, and I took the A train

to Greenwich Village, and I went to the Eighth Street

Bookstore, the center o f the universe, the place where real

poets went, the most incredible place on earth, they made

beauty from the dark, the gray, the cement, your head down

in someone’s lap, the torn skin on your bruised knees, your

bloody hands; it wasn’t the raspy, choked, rough whisper, it

was real beautiful words with the perfect shape and sound and

filled with pain and rage and pure, perfect; and I looked

everywhere, at every book, at every poem, at every play, and I

touched every book o f poems, I just touched them, just passed

my hand over them, and I bought any poems I had money for,

sometimes it was just a few pages stapled together with print

on it, and I kept them with me and I could barely breathe, and I

knew names no one else knew, Charles Olsen, Robert

Duncan, Gregory Corso, Anselm Hollo, Leroi Jones,

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Creeley,

Kenneth Rexroth; and when Allen Ginsberg had new poems I

almost died, Allen Ginsberg who was the most perfect and the

bravest and the best and the words were perfect beauty and

perfect power and perfect pain and I carried them with me and

read them, stunned and truly trembling inside because they

went past all lies to something hidden inside; and I got back on

the bus and I got back to Camden and I had the poems and

someday it would be me. I wrote words out on paper and hid

them because my mother would say they were dirty words; all

the true words were dirty words. I wrote private, secret words

in funny-shaped lines. Y ou could take the dark— the thick,

mean, hard, sad dark— the gray cement, lonely as death, cold

as death, stone cold, the torn skin, you on your knees your

hands bleeding on the cold cement, and you could use words

to say I am— I am, I want, I know , I feel, I see. N in o ’s knife,

cold, on the edge o f m y skin down m y back, the cement

underneath: I want, I know, I feel; then he tears you apart from

behind, inside. Y ou could use words to say what it was and

how it felt, the dark banging into you, pressing up against you,

pinning you down, a suffocating mask over your face or a

granite mountain pressing you under it, you’re a fossil, delicate,