Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page A

that he loves me and he lifts me up and puts his lips over mine and sticks his tongue in my mouth and buries his rough face down in my collar and licks and drags his tongue over my shoulder and neck and his hands are up inside my shirt and he’s rubbing them back and forth across my belly and sides taking quick handfuls of flesh and twisting and rubbing and then they’re inside my pants and he suddenly rips apart the opening of my pants I hear metal buttons hitting the floor and he punches me in the side of the head at the same time pulling my hair and pulling me back down to the floor and I’m on my belly I feel cold rough stone scratching my skin and he kneels down suddenly into the center of my back and it hurts and I try to yell but he’s shoving my underwear into my mouth and I’m suddenly hit with such a feeling of intense claustrophobia and fear that it’s hours before I realize that my hands and legs are tied together and that I’m lying on my side and the rag in my mouth is soaking wet and making small bubbling sounds each time I breathe.
    eight . I saw her in mexico city after a day of walking around the outskirts of the upper-class zone of the city. A year after the big earthquake the buildings are still tumbling, great heaving cracks in their facades, thirty floors of vacant offices, burst windows, potted plastic palms and calendars flapping above dead machines. I saw her after a day filled with rich people and poor people; a day of diamond rings on lifeless fingers; a day of armless and legless men in the dawn (I saw the missing limbs for a fraction of a moment, suspended against the blue exhaust clouds of the city streets).
    I saw her. She’s about eight feet tall and she has the twin feet of an enormous eagle and both her arms are large serpent’s heads with tongues tasting the wind and her head, they told me, had been cut off by her brother somewhere in the skies years ago in some struggle for power and now she carries her dry skull in the center of her massive belly and where her head had been were now two large serpents symbolizing the flowing of blood and around her hips she wore a skirt made entirely of snakes, dozens of them. Around her shoulders she wore a necklace of rope that was strung with human hearts and human hands and they told me she was the goddess of the earth and they told me she was the goddess of life and death and I was amazed at how seductive she was.
    nine . Sometimes it’s like long ago when words were slow and we were meeting beneath faraway rivers. How slowly the water shifts, how slow these stones assuming the shapes of walls and roadways, lockups and borders. When they invented the car they invented the collision and the darkness of what time leads the willing body into. It’s seeing how slowly we shift position from room to room; seeing how sleep has quietly become an extension of the day; how if we take the more horrifying aspects of the world and fuse them to the unspeaking and unmoving stone lips of religious icons surely huge sections of the population will kneel before them in reverence.
    Sometimes I get seized by a discrete sensation, something like a small madness where the senses reel behind the eyes. In the midst of crowds or in immense landscapes where the sense of sky is almost deafening, great big cracks in the earth like dusty photographs of lightning. I carry silence like a blood-filled egg, ready to drop it into someone’s hands. When I was small and it would rain I thought it rained all over the world but now I don’t think so. Riding out here over the dirt roads, the day opened up like a kid falling into sunlight; sprawling out on a green lawn tasting milk on his lips. Right this minute I could tip right down into the deep of that canyon, jump from rock to rock effortlessly, thinking bird thoughts weightless like death. Smack my face against that tree, like the bird against the front of my car. The hot sun as my