Every style has its dangers
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The dark wasn’t just at night. The dark was any time, any place; you open your eyes and the dark is there, right up against you, pressing. You can’t see anything and you don’t know any names, not who they are or the names for what they do; the dark is all you know
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The dark stayed dark and hard but now it had a sound in it, a bittersweet lyric, music carried on the edge of a broken line. Then my momma found the words I wrote and called me awful names, foul names, in a screaming voice, in filthy hate, she screamed I was dirty, she screamed she wanted me off the face of the earth, she screamed she’d lock me up.
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Men wanted you all the time and never had enough of you and the cement was a great, gray plain stretching out forever and you could wander on it forever, free, with signs that they had been there and promises they would come back, abrasions, burns, thin, exquisite cuts; not locked up. Under them, covered, buried, pinned still — the dark ramming into you — you could hear a heartbeat. And somewhere there were ones who could sing.Whisper; touch everywhere; sing.
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When I was fourteen I refused to face the wall during a bomb drill. They would ring a bell and we all had to file out of class, in a line, and stand four or five deep against a wall in the hall and you had to put your hands behind your head and your elbows over your ears and it hurt to keep your arms like that until they decided the bomb wasn’t coming this time. I thought it was stupid so I wouldn’t do it. I said I wanted to see it coming if it was going to kill me. I really did want to see it. Of course no one would see it coming, it was too fast, but I wanted to see something, I wanted to know something, I wanted to know that this was it and I was dying. It would just be a tiny flash of a second, so small you couldn’t even imagine it, but I wanted it whatever it was like. I wanted my whole life to go through my brain or to feel myself dying or whatever it was. I didn’t want to be facing a wall pretending tomorrow was coming.
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They punished me or disciplined me or whatever it is they think they’re doing when they threaten you all the time.
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I wanted to scream and in my brain I screamed, it was a real voice screaming like something so loud it could make your head explode but I was too smart to scream in real life so I asked quietly and intelligently why we couldn’t talk and they said we might miss important instructions. I mean: important instructions; do you grasp it?
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Adults told terrible lies, not regular lies; ridiculous, stupid lies that made you have to hate them. They would say anything to make you do what they wanted and they would make you afraid of anything. No one ever told so many lies before, probably.
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You can’t forgive them when you’re a child and they make you afraid. So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it’s a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn’t have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can’t tell the adults that; they don’t care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there’s something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she’s still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.
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New York’s home because there’s other people the same; we know each other as much as you have to, not much. The only other way is the slow time o f mothers; facing a wall, staring at a blank wall, for life, one man, forever, marriage, the living dead. I don’t want to be like them. I never will be. I’m not afraid of dying and I’m not standing quiet at some wall; the bomb comes at me, I’m going to hurl myself into it; flashfly into its fucking face. I’m fine on the streets. I’m not afraid; of fucking or anyone; and there’s nothing I’m afraid of. I have ideals about peace and freedom and it doesn’t matter what the adults think, because they lie and they’re stupid. I’m sincere and smarter than them. I believe in universal love. I want to love everybody even if I don’t know them and not to have small minds like the adults. I don’t mind if people are strangers or how they look and no matter how raw somebody is they’re human; it’s the plastic ones that aren’t human. I don’t need a lot, a place to sleep, some money, almost none, cigarettes. Everyone in this place knows something, jazz or poems oranarchism or dope or books I never heard o f before, and they don’t like the bomb. They’ve lived and they don’t hide from knowing things and sex is the main way you live — adults say it isn’t but they never told the truth yet. New York’s the whole world, it’s like living inside a heartbeat, you know, like a puppy you can put your head up against the ticking when you’re lonely and when you want to move the beat’s behind you. I don’t need things. I’m not an American consumer. I’m on the peace side and I have ideals about freedom and I don’t want anyone telling me what to do, I’ve had enough of it, I’m against war, I go to demonstrations, I’m a pacifist, I have been since I can remember.
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