from where Walt Whitman lived. I liked having him there
because it meant that once it was somewhere; it meant you
could be great; it meant Camden was something; it meant
there was something past the rubble, this great gray man who
wasn’t afraid o f America and so I wasn’t afraid to go anywhere
and I could love anyone, like he said. Camden was broken
streets, broken cement, crushed gray dust, jagged, broken
cement. The houses were broken bricks, red bricks, red,
blood red, I love brick row houses, I love blood red, wine red,
crumbled into sawdust; w e’re dust too, blood red dust. It was
a cement place with broken streets and broken bricks and I
loved the cement and I loved the broken streets and I loved the
broken bricks and I never felt afraid, just alone, not sad, not
afraid. I had to go away from home early to seek freedom
which is a good thing because you don’t want to be a child for
too long. You get strong if you go away from where you are a
child; home; people say it’s home; you get strong but you
don’t have a lot o f words because people use words to talk
about things and if you don’t have things there’s few words
you need. It’s funny how silence goes with having nothing and
how you have nothing to say if you don’t have things and
words don’t mean much anyway because you can’t really use
them for anything if you have nothing. If you go away from
home you live without things. Things never mattered to me
and I never wanted them but sometimes I wanted words. I
read a lot to find words that were the right ones and I loved the
words I read but they weren’t exactly the ones. They were like
them but not them. I just moved along the streets and I took
what was coming and often I didn’t know what to call it. We
were going to die soon, that was for sure, with the bomb
coming, and there weren’t words for that either, even though
people threw words at it. Y ou could say you didn’t want to die
and you didn’t want them to wipe out the earth but w ho could
you say. it to so it would matter? I didn’t like people throwing
words at it when words couldn’t touch it, when you couldn’t
even wrap your mind around it at all. When I thought about
being safe I could hear the word Andrea coming from m y
m other’s lips when I was a baby, her mouth on me because she
loved me and I was in her arms but it ended soon. I played in
the bricks and on the cement; in rubble; in garbage; in alleys;
and I went from Camden to N ew Y o rk and the quiet was all
around me even more as if I was sinking under it sometimes;
and I thought, if your momma isn’t here to say your name
there is nothing to listen to. I f you try to say some words it is
likely people don’t understand them anyway. I don’t think
people in houses understand anything about the w ord cold. I
don’t think they understand the word wet. I don’t think you
could explain cold to them but if you did other words would
