the book o f signs, manhood or courage but it’s different when
pussy does it. Y ou don’t set up housekeeping, a room with
things; instead you carry it all on you, not on your back tied
down, or on your head piled up; it’s in you, carved in, the cold
on you, you on cement, sexy abrasions, sexy blood, sexy
black and blue, the heat’s on you, your sw eat’s a wet
membrane between you and the weather, all there is, and you
have burns, scars, there’s gray cement, a silver gray under a
tarnished, brassy moon, there’s a cement graveyard, brick
gravestones, the em pty brick buildings; and yo u ’re laid out,
for the fucking. Walt was a fool, a virgin fool; you would have
been ground down, it’s not love, it’s slaughter, you fucking
fool. I’m the field, they fall on me and bruise the ground, you
don’t hear the earth you fall on crying out but a poet should
know. Prophets are fucking fools. What I figured out is that
writers sit in rooms and make it up. M arx made it up. Walt
made it up. Fucking fools like me believe it; do it; foot soldiers
in hell. Sleep is the worst time, God puts you in a fuck-m e
position, you can’t run, you can’t fight, you can’t stay alive
without luck, you’re in the dark and dead, they can get you,
have you, use you; you manage to disappear, become invisible
in the dark, or it’s like being hung out to dry, you’re under
glass, in a museum, all laid out, on display, waiting fpr
whatever gang passes by to piss on you; it’s inside, they’re not
supposed to come inside but there is no inside where they can’t
come, it’s only doors and windows to keep them out, open
sesame and the doors and windows open or they bash them
open and no one stops them and you’re inside laid out for
them, come, hurt me now, I’m lying flat, helpless, some
fucking innocent naked baby, a sweet, helpless thing all curled
up like a fetus as if I were safe, inside her; but there’s nothing
between you and them; she’s not between you and them. Why
did God make you have to sleep? I was born in Camden; I’m
twenty; I can’t remember the last time I heard my name. M y
name is and will the real one please stand up, do you remember
that game show on television, from when it was easy. Women
will whisper it to you, even dirty street women; even leather
women; even mean women. Y ou have to be careful i f you
want it from the street women; they might be harder than you,
know where you’re soft, see through you, you’re all different
with them because maybe they can see through you. M aybe
you’re not the hardest bitch. Maybe she’s going to take from
you. I don’t give; I take. It’s when she’s on me I hear m y name;
doesn’t matter who she is, I love her to death, women are
generous this way, the meanest o f us, I say her name, she says
mine, kisses brushing inside the ear, she’s wet all over me, it’s
all continuous, you’re not in little pieces, I hear m y name like
the sound o f the ocean in a shell; whether she’s saying it or not.
