swatted; but it doesn’t exist so you can’t think about it because
it isn’t there and didn’t happen and couldn’t happen and is only
an awful word and isn’t even a word that anyone can say and it
isn’t ever true; so you are splattered up against a night that will
go on forever except nothing happened, it will go on forever
and it isn’t anything in any w ay at all. It don’t matter anyw ay
and I can’t remember things anyw ay, all sorts o f things get
lost, I can’t remember most o f what happened to me from day
to day and I don’t know names for it anyw ay to say or who to
say it to and I live in a silence I carry that’s bigger than m y
shadow or any dark falling over me, it’s a heavy thing on m y
back and over m y head and it pours out over me down to the
ground. Words aren’t so easy anymore or they never were and
it was a lie that they seemed so. Some time ago they seemed
easier and there were more o f them. I’m Andrea but no one
says m y name so that I can hear it anymore. I go to jail against
the Vietnam War; it’s night there too, the long night, the sun is
dead, the time bomb is ticking, your heart hears it; the
vagabond’s night, not the burgher’s. I’m arrested in February.
It is cold. There is a driving wind. It slices you in pieces. It goes
right through you and comes out the other side. It freezes your
bones and your skin is a paper-thin ice, translucent. I am
against the War. I am against war. I find it easier to do things
than to say things. I am losing the w ords I had about peace.
The peace boys have all the words. The peace boys take all the
words and use them; they say them. I can’t think o f ones for
myself. T hey don’t mean what they say; words are trash to
them; it’s hollow, what they say; but the words belong to
them. In January I sat in court and saw Ja y sent aw ay for five
years to a federal prison. He w ouldn’t go to Vietnam. I sat
there and I watched and there was nothing to say. The peace
boys talked words but the words were trash. When the time
came Jay stood there, a hulking six-foot black man and I know
he wanted to cry, and the Feds took him out and he was gone
for five years. The peace boys were white. He was afraid and
the peace boys were exuberant. He didn’t have words; he
could barely say anything when the ju dge gave him his few
seconds to speak after being sentenced or before, I don’t
know, it was all predecided anyway; I think the judge said five
years then invited Ja y to speak and I swear he almost fell down
from the shock and the reality o f it and he mumbled a couple o f
words but there wasn’t anything to say and federal marshals
took him o ff and his mother and sisters were there and they
had tears, not words, and the peace boys had no tears, only
words about the struggle o f the black man against the racist
war in Vietnam, I couldn’t stop crying through the thing
