push it out o f their minds in a minute. T hat’s what they use
words for, to bury things. People learn long w ords to show
o ff but if you can’t say what cold is so people understand what
use is more syllables? I could never explain anything and I was
em pty inside where the words go but it was an emptiness that
caused vertigo, I fought against it and tried to keep standing
upright. I never knew what to call most things but things I
knew, cold or wet, didn’t mean much. Y o u could say you
were cold and people nodded or smiled.
fear when I hear it. They know what it means on the surface
and how to use it in a sentence but they don’t know what it is,
don’t care, couldn’t remember if you told them. T h e y ’d forget
it in a minute. Cold. O r rape. Y ou could never find out what it
was from one o f them or say it to mean anything or to be
anything. Y o u could never say it so it was true. Y o u could
never say it to someone so they would help you or make
anything better or even help you a little or try to help you. Y ou
could never say it, not so it was anything. People laughed or
said something dirty. Or if you said someone did it you were
just a liar straight out; or it was you, dirty animal, who pulled
them on you to hurt you. Or if you said you were it, raped,
were it, which you never could say, but if you said it, then they
put shame on you and never looked at you again. I think so.
And it was just an awful word anyway, some awful word. I
didn’t know what it meant either or what it was, not really,
not like cold; but it was worse than cold, I knew that. It was
being trapped in night, frozen stuck in it, not the nights people
who live in houses sleep through but the nights people who
live on the streets stay awake through, those nights, the long
nights with every second ticking like a time bomb and your
heart hears it. It was night, the long night, and despair and
being abandoned by all humankind, alone on an empty planet,
colder than cold, alive and frozen in despair, alone on earth
with no one, no words and no one and nothing; cold to frozen
but cursed by being alive and nowhere near dead; stuck frozen
in nowhere; no one with no words; alone in the vagabond’s
night, not the burgher’s; in night, trapped alive in it, in
despair, abandoned, colder than cold, frozen alive, right there,
freeze flash, forever and never let loose; the sun had died so the
night and the cold would never end. God w on ’t let you loose
from it though. Y ou don’t get to die. Instead you have to stay
alive and raped but it doesn’t exist even though God made it to
begin with or it couldn’t happen and He saw it too but He is
gone now that it’s over and you’re left there no matter where
you go or how much time passes even if you get old or how
much you forget even if you burn holes in your brain. Y ou
stay smashed right there like a fly splattered over a screen,
