Mercy

Whitman lived, in Camden, Andrea, it means manhood or

courage but it was pink pussy anyway wrapped in a pink fuzzy

blanket with big men’s fingers going coochie coochie coo.

Pappa said don’t believe what’s in books but if it was a poem I

believed it; m y first lyric poem was a street, cement, gray,

lined with monuments, broken brick buildings, archaic,

empty vessels, great, bloodstained walls, a winding road to

nowhere, gray, hard, light falling on it from a tarnished moon

so it was silver and brass in the dark and it went out straight

into the gray sky where the moon was, one road o f cement and

silver and night stained red with real blood, you’re down on

your knees and he’s pushing you from inside, G od’s heartbeat

ramming into you and the skin is scraped loose and you bleed

and stain the stone under you. Here’s the poem you got. It’s

your flesh scraped until it’s rubbed o ff and you got a mark, you

got a burn, you got stains o f blood, you got desolation on you.

It’s his mark on you and you’ve got his smell on you and his

bruise inside you; the houses are monuments, brick, broken

brick, red, blood red. There’s a skyline, five floors high, three

floors high, broken brick, chopped o ff brick, empty inside,

with gravel lots and a winding cement road, Dorothy

tap-dances to Oz, up the yellow brick road, the great gray road,

he’s on you, twisted on top o f you, his arms twisted in your

arms, his legs twisted in your legs, he’s twisted in you, there’s

a great animal in the dark, him twisting draped over you, the

sweat silver and slick; the houses are brick, monuments

around you, you’re laid out dead and they’re the headstones,

nothing written on them, they tower over your body put to

rest. The only signs o f existence are on you, you carry them on

you, the marks, the bruises, the scars, your body gets marked

where you exist, it’s a history book with the signs o f civilized

life, communication, the city, the society, belles lettres, a

primitive alphabet o f blood and pain, the flesh poem, poem o f

the girl, when a girl says yes, what a girl says yes to, what

happens to a girl who is poesy on cement, your body the paper

and the poem, the press and the ink, the singer and the song;

it’s real, it’s literal, this song o f myself, yo u ’re what there is,

the medium, the message, the sign, the signifier; an autistic

poem. Tattooed boys are your friends, they write the words

on their skin; but your skin gets used up, scraped aw ay every

time they push you down, you carry what you got and what

you know, all your belongings, him on you through time, in

the scars— your meanings, your lists, your items, your serial

numbers and identification numbers, social security, registration, which one you are, your name in blood spread thin on

your skin, spread out on porous skin, thin and stretched, a

delicate shade o f fear toughened by callouses o f hate; and you

learn to read your name on your body written in your blood,