enough. The part I like is breathing. Y ou take all the air in you,
inert stuff, and you exhale like you is threatening God
face-to-face; you push like the air itself could kill. All the air
you took in during fucking, all that Goddamn spastic inhaling,
all that panting like some desperate dog, you shoot out, like
it’s bullets; I got a lot o f air to push out. Then there’s the horse
position, where you take a stance, your legs spread far apart so
your thigh muscles are tearing from the weight o f your whole
body resting on them; your feet are pointed out and your legs
are spread far apart and your knees are bent and pointing out
and the rest o f you is on your thighs, absolutely still, at perfect
silence; and after about five minutes your calf muscles begin to
bear the weight o f your thighs which time makes heavier and
somehow you feel the weight o f your soul and your life in the
muscles in the insides o f your thighs, because if you ’re a girl
you lived there and m em ory’s stored there and the world
banged up against you there, so you undertake to bear the
burden o f it with conscious knowledge, a physical self-
consciousness, a remorseless, aching cognition; and the
history in your body comes alive as the muscles in your thighs
strain under the weight o f your life; the life o f the cell; a
brilliant physical solitude with all o f the self spread out along
the fault line o f the thighs, a bridge o f muscle; and you are
absolutely still, contemplative, in pain, yes, a located pain, a
fierce ache o f recognition and identity; you are still; until
Sensei orders you to relax, which is only slightly less
burdensome but feels like deliverance; and I think to m yself
that everything these thighs took they will get strong enough
to give back; it is a promise I make m yself in horse position to
be able to bear it; it is a promise I make every time over and
over; it is a promise my thighs will remember even if I forget.
Sensei says women got an advantage with the thighs, more
strength than we might expect, because o f the high heels they
make us wear; I got strong thighs because o f the reason under
the reason; I been in horse position on m y back most o f my
life; I like it alone and standing up. Sensei says eat steak but I
can only afford potatoes, or sometimes frozen squash, or
sometimes cheese, or the free bar food, but the men are
unbearable so I don’t do that unless I am ravenous; sometimes
I’m hungry too much. I take double classes twice a week
because I want to be strong; I am dying to be strong; all my
money goes to Sensei and I fail at sit-ups twice in a night and I
fail to do one whole push-up twice in a night, two times a
week; and I have to come up with a stupendous amount o f
money, because it is fifteen dollars a class, so that is fifteen
times four, and Sensei berates me when I say I will have to take
a single class twice a week for a month or two or even three
because I cannot find the money to pay for double classes; I feel
m y serious w ord that this is so is enough but she takes it as if I
am lying or I don’t value her or I don’t have devotion, as if it’s
an excuse; and I feel enraged; because it’s as if she’d turn me out
for her fucking money, if you want it you can get it she says
like any pimp on the street; I am a writer, I am going to hurt
men, I am a serious person; she knows it. Sensei says she’s
never seen anyone with a will like mine but it’s a trick to flatter
me so I’ll be persuaded to get the money for double classes
after I’ve said I can’t and I’m feeling the indignity because I am
pure will and I have not insulted her by uttering one frivolous
word. I am engaged in the serious jo b o f survival and the
creation o f a plan to stop men; hurt them, stop them, kill them;
and I am not some fool who says insubstantial things and I
don’t have money to m ove around, as if I can take it from
something I don’t need, which I feel is an indignity to have to
explain, and I feel rage because she is middle-class in this w ay
that demeans me and the dojo’s in a Victorian brownstone she
owns with her lover, a woman with round shoulders and
sagging breasts who does not do sit-ups or horse position
standing up; there is a sudden horror in my heart, a queasy
feeling o f sickness and dread, because I ask her to be sober and
treat me with honor and she degrades me because o f money
and I cannot forgive it. I am learning that inside something
goes w rong when something w rong happens; I am learning to
follow it, the feeling. I say I write and it is first and I have thirty
dollars I can find, not sixty, and I do not say how much I give
up to give her the thirty because to do so would be demeaning
in m y heart, the sick feeling would come on, and she belittles
me and I leave and I never turn back. D o not mess with me. I
am making a plan in writing to make the men shed tears o f
remorse and I cannot waste m y time with someone insufficient; she has to deserve me too; I want respect; there’s a piece missing in her— what’s hunger, what’s poor; it’s the pieces I
got; I can’t explain how what’s a blind spot in her blindsides
me; I can’t have her talk money to me which she measures one
w ay and I measure in sucking dicks, the economy as I see it,
how long on your knees, how many times, equals a meal,
makes the rent. I ain’t saying it to her, it’s an inchoate rage, but
I turn over inside; Sensei eats shit. I say nothing, because she’s
an innocent, she counts money dry, not drenched in sperm. I
cut her o ff without another word. She is out o f my life. I don’t
look back. I paid, sister, I am paid up in dues well into the next
century, I have clear priorities, she was number two, pretty
high on the fucking list; number one is that I am writing a plan
for revenge, a justice plan, a justice poem, a justice map, a
geography o f justice; I am martial in my heart and military in
my mind; I think in strategy and in poems, a daughter o f
Guevara and Whitman, ready to take to the hills with a cosmic
vision o f what’s crawling around down on the ground; a
daughter with an overview; the big view; a daughter with a
new practice o f righteous rage, against what ain’t named and
ain’t spoken so it can’t be prosecuted except by the one it was
done to who knows it, knows him; I’m inventing a new
practice o f random self-defense; I take their habits and
characteristics seriously, as enemy, and I plan to outsmart
them and win; they want to stay anonymous, monster
shadows, brutes, king pricks, they want to strike like lightning, any time, any place, they want to be sadistic ghosts in the dark with penises that slice us open, they want us dumb and
mute and vacant, robbed o f words, nothing has a name, not
anything they do to us, there’s nothing because w e’re nothing;
then they must mean they want us to strike them down,
indiscriminate, in the night; we require a sign language o f<
br />
rebellion; it’s the only chance they left us. Y ou may find me
one who ain’t guilty but you can’t find me two. I have a vision,
far into the future, a plan for an arm y for justice, a girls’ army,
subversive, on the ground, down and dirty, no uniforms, no
rank, no orders from on high, a martial spirit, a cadre o f
honor, an arm y o f girls spreading out over the terrain, I see
them m oving through the streets, thick formations o f them in
anarchy and freedom on cement. I keep practicing horse
position and sit-ups and I kick good; I can kick to the knee and
I can kick to the cock but I can’t kick to the solar plexus and I
can’t kick his fucking head o ff but I can compensate with my
intelligence and with m y right thinking if I can isolate it, in
other words, rescue it from the nightmares; liberate it; deep
liberation. I practice on m y wall to get m y kick higher, never
touching the wall, Zen karate, a new dimension in control and
a new level o f aggression, a new arena o f attack as if I am
walking up the wall without touching it; and I will do the same
to them; Zen killing. M y fist ain’t good enough but m y thighs
needless to say are superb, possibly even sublime, it’s been
noted many times. M any a man’s died his little death there and
I made the mistake o f not burying him when he was exactly
ripe for it, not putting him, whole, under the ground, but I
soaked up his soul, I took it like they always fear, I stole his
essence to in me, it’s protein, I got his molecules; and I never
died. It is more than relevant; it is the point. I never died. I am
not dead. If you use us up and use us up and use us up but don’t
kill us we ain’t dead, boys; a word to the wise; peace now, or
there’s a mean lot o f killing coming. I am torn up in many
places and I am a m oving mountain o f pain, I have tears body
and soul, I am marked and scarred and black-and-blue inside
and out, I got torn muscles in m y throat and blood that dried
there that w o n ’t ever dislodge and rips in m y vagina the size o f
fists and fissures in m y anus like rivers and holes in m y heart, a
sad heart; but I ain’t dead, I never died, which means, boys, I
can march, I want to walk to God on you, stretch you out
under me, a pathway to heaven. And I am real; Andrea one,
two, three, there’s more than one, I am reliably informed; the
raped; Andrea, named for courage, a new incarnation o f
virility, in the old days called manhood and I’m what happens
when it’s fucked; we go by other names, Sally, Jane, whatever;
but I had a prophet for a mama and she named not just a
daughter but a breed, who the girl is when the worm turns;
put Thomas Jefferson in my place, horse position on his back
with a mob o f erect rapists coming and going at will, at their
pleasure; and ask what a more perfect union is; or would be;
from his point o f view; then. Put anyone human where I been
and make a plan; for freedom. I will fill you with remorse
because you fucked me to ground meat and because you buy it
and you sell it and the hole in my heart is commerce to you;
lover, husband, boychick, brother, friend, political radical,
boy comrade; I can’t fucking tell you all apart. Y o u ’re
pouncing things that push it in,. lush with insult or austere with
pain; I don’t got no radio in my stomach like the crazy ones
who get messages to kill and can’t turn it o ff or dislodge it
although you stuck enough in me, they say they hear voices
and they kill, they say they are getting orders and they kill, and
the psychiatrists come in the newspapers and call them long
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, str
etching
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,
Mercy Page 42
