Mercy (96 page)

bad names and go to court and say they didn’t know what they

were doing; but they knew; because everyone knows. The

psychiatrists miss it all but especially that there’s information

everywhere; the radio, the voices, are metaphors used by

poets who dance rather than write it down, poet-killers; action

poems; there’s energy that buzzes, a coherent language o f

noise and static you can learn to read, you don’t need to be

subliterate on this plane, just receive, receive; there’s waves

you can see, you can take a fucking light beam and parse it for

information or you can decode the information in the aura o f

light around a person or a thing; everything’s coded; everything’s whole; it’s all right there, including the future, you can

ju st pull it out, it’s just more information, a buzz, a vibration, a

radiance, even a smell in the air; and we are all one, sweetheart,

which means that i f I’m you I got your secrets including your

dirty little rape secrets and your dirty little what you stick it in

secrets, you can ju st pull the information out o f the air as to

who is evil and what is going on, how it works and what must

be done; you can learn to see it and you can learn to hear it

because you are flowing in an occan o f information and the

information gets amplified by pedestrian events, for instance,

you learn at karate school that they pin you down at both ends,

they got different shoulders from you, which you didn’t

know, and they made yours useless like bound feet, which you

didn’t know; and they nail you, they plug you, the penis goes

right through you on one end and screws you down, fixes you

fast to some hard surface, and the shoulders are like a ton o f

metal dumped on you to keep you flat, it’s information on the

literal level, the pedestrian plane, a reminder o f mechanical

reality or a new lesson in it because girls don’t learn mechanics

or anything else that will help on the physical plane to rebel or

get free so you got to read the cosmic information in the air,

the molecular information, which could even come from

other planets i f you think about it, it could be m oving towards

you on light from far away, and you also got to be a student o f

reality as it is com m only understood. They fill your head with

political theory because it’s useless; it’s dreams you can’t have;

o f dignity that ain’t yours; o f freedom that ain’t intended on

any level for you; you take it to heart; they take you to bed;

heartbreak hotel, the place where the dialectic abandons

reality, leaving her barefoot and pregnant, raped and barefoot;

these are the dreams that break your heart, the difference

between what you wanted from Cam us and what he would

have given you; I always wanted to have a cup o f coffee with

him, on the boulevard; and how these men love whores; the

thinkers, the truck drivers, the students, the cops; how they

love you turned out, shivering in the cold, already undressed

enough; no, they don’t all rape; they all buy. I am an

apprentice: sorcerer or assassin or vandal or vigilante; or

avenger; I am in formation as the new one who will emerge; I

am in a cocoon; but at night, being a girl, I just stroll; I am a girl

who walks the streets at night, back to first principles, how I

grew up, where I lived, my home, cement, gray, stretching

out a thousand miles flat, a plain o f loneliness and despair; my

world; m y bed; my place on earth; I will populate the dark

forever, o f course, night is my country, I belong here, I can’t

get free, I was condemned, exiled from daylight because

survival required facing the dark; I am a citizen o f the night,

with a passport, a mouth used enough, it’s vulgar to say but

inside it changes, the skin gets raw and red and it blisters, it

gets small, tight, white blisters, liquidy blisters, it gets tough

and brown, it gets leathery, it sags in loose red places and there

are black-and-blue marks, and your tongue never touches the

ro o f o f your mouth, instead there’s a layer o f slime, sticky

slime, a white, viscous slime, a m oving cement that never

hardens and never disappears, a near mortar o f awful white

stuff, mucous and slime; you got a mouth crawling on top

with slime; as if it’s worms in you, spermy little worm things

all laid out side by side all in a line lining the ro o f o f your

mouth; a protein shield, if you want to put the best construction on it, because you don’t want his shit shooting to the top

o f your brain anyway, going through the ro of o f your mouth

to your head, you don’t want his molecules absorbed in your

brain, planted there so his molecular reality grow s in some

hemisphere o f your brain, you don’t want him as weeds in

your head, with his D . N . A. rolling all over behind your eyes;

and o f course you try to keep him as high in your mouth as you

can, as close to the front, as little in; always give as little as you

can; not just on principle, as in, give as little o f anything as you

can; but you give as little o f yourself as you can in a literal

sense, not as an abstract concept o f self but as little o f your

mouth as you can; except for the one who rammed it down to

the bottom, into your chest or your lungs or however far he

got, he shattered muscles as if they was glass, splintered them

as i f they was bone, you could feel a smashed larynx

swim m ing in blood, like a dead animal, all bleeding and cut

open, I got a sexy voice now, something hoarse and missing,

an absence, a bare vibration; but he w asn’t a trick, he was a

cute boy, true love and real romance, remember him I instruct

m yself because it’s hard, rape’s hard, remem bering’s hard,

they have to break so much there’s no deep deep enough to

bury it in, they leave you with crushed bones, diced nerves,

live nerves, sliced nerves as if someone took a knife to the

nerve endings themselves, not so they are cut dead but so they

are being sliced each minute o f forever, and they don’t go

dead, there’s not half a second o f numbness or paralysis, the

nerves are open and alive and being hit by the air, exposed, and

the knife is cutting into them thread by thread, they’re stringy

and the knife’s pulling them apart, and you got an acute pain

and a loud scream, high decibels, ringing in your ears, a

torture ringing in your ears, and it don’t let you sleep and you

don’t get forgetfulness, your eyes cry blood and you got open

sores, the lips o f your labia get boils, big boils; you got a

vagina with long, deep tears, an ass that rips open with blood

every time you shit, because it’s the penis again, oversized,

pulling out after haying torn its w ay in; and then you will

remember rape; these are the elements o f m em ory,
constant,

true, and perpetual pain\
and otherwise you will forget— we are

a legion o f zombies— because it burns out a piece o f your

brain, it’s the scorched earth policy for the sweetmeat in your

head, the rape recipe, braise, sear, burn bare, there’s a sudden

conflagration on the surface o f your brain, a piece o f one

hemisphere or the other is burned bare, blank, and you lose

w hatever’s there; ju st gone; whatever; so rape’s a tw o-