Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz

… yer my babe with that roping-the-steer cowboy voice I can hear the distances in that voice and smell the gathering sweat on the surface of the tires yer my babe ahh and I’m already falling cowboy-off-the-cliff-like and he’s moving his warm belly sliding it against my back taking the nape of my neck in his cold white teeth and turning my head slightly opening my eyes without my glasses and through the luminous blaze of sudden sunlight fall these shadows—the outline of thousands of leaves connected to branches that dip and bend in the wind.
    A pair of empty cowboy boots sailing slow motion across dark blue space and bouncing lazily against a bunk-house wall and then settling slowly into a series of geometric blue shadows. Crickets. Blue cowboy bodies amputating from blue darkness into the pale light. Crickets. Light blue semen uncoiling across a blue torso in some small fever.
    seven . He’s got me down on my knees and I can’t even focus on anything I have no time to understand the position of my body or the direction of my face I see a pair of legs in rough corduroy and the color of the pants are brown and surrounded by darkness and there’s a sense of other people there and yet I can’t hear them breathe or hear their feet or anything and his hand suddenly comes up against the back of my head and he’s got his fingers locked in my hair and he’s shoving my face forward and twisting my head almost gently but very violent in that gentleness and I got only half a breath in my lungs the smell of piss on the floorboards and this fleshy bulge in his pants getting harder and harder as my face is forced against the front of his pants the zipper tears my lips I feel them getting bruised and all the while he’s stroking my face and tightening his fingers around the locks of my hair and I can’t focus my eyes my head being pushed and pulled and twisted and caressed and it’s as if I have no hands I know I got hands I had hands a half hour ago I remember lighting a cigarette with them lighting a match and I remember how warm the flame was when I lifted it toward my face and my knees are hurting from the floor it’s a stone floor and my knees are hurting ’cause they banged on the floor when he dragged me down the cellar stairs I remember a door in the darkness and the breath of a dog his dog as it licked my hands when I reached out to stop my headlong descent its tongue licking out at my fingers and my face slams down and there’s this electric blam inside my head and it’s as if my eyes suddenly opened on the large sun and then went black with the switch thrown down and I’m shocked and embarrassed and his arms swing down he’s lifting me up saying, lookin’ for me?, and he buries his face in my neck and I feel the saliva running down into the curve of my neck and my arms are hanging loose and I can see a ceiling and a dim bulb tossing back and forth and suddenly I’m on my knees again and my face is getting mashed into his belly and sliding down across rough cloth and zippers and there’s this sweet musty smell and his dick is slapping across my eyes and rubbing over my cheeks and bloody lips and suddenly it’s inside my mouth and the hands twisted up in my hair and cradling my skull shove me forward and I feel his dick hit the back of my throat and I feel pain for the first time like the open pants are in focus and he’s pulled his dick out of my mouth and I’m choking and he’s running one hand over my face putting his fingers in my ears in my mouth dragging down my lower jaw and forcing his dick in between the fingers and the saliva and blood and shoving shoving in and out and pulling on my hair and everything goes out of focus my eyes moving around blindly the smell of basement water and sewage and mustiness and dirt and he’s slapping my face like he wants to wake me up and I realize I’m crying and he tells me