Mercy by Andrea Dworkin Read Free Book Online

as hard and unyielding as the cement
    under it. In N ew Y ork I got o ff the bus dank from old Charles,
    old Vincent, he walked away, wet, rumpled, not •looking
    back, and I had some dollars in my hand, and I took the A train
    to Greenwich Village, and I went to the Eighth Street
    Bookstore, the center o f the universe, the place where real
    poets went, the most incredible place on earth, they made
    beauty from the dark, the gray, the cement, your head down
    in someone’s lap, the torn skin on your bruised knees, your
    bloody hands; it wasn’t the raspy, choked, rough whisper, it
    was real beautiful words with the perfect shape and sound and
    filled with pain and rage and pure, perfect; and I looked
    everywhere, at every book, at every poem, at every play, and I
    touched every book o f poems, I just touched them, just passed
    my hand over them, and I bought any poems I had money for,
    sometimes it was just a few pages stapled together with print
    on it, and I kept them with me and I could barely breathe, and I
    knew names no one else knew, Charles Olsen, Robert
    Duncan, Gregory Corso, Anselm Hollo, Leroi Jones,
    Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Creeley,
    Kenneth Rexroth; and when Allen Ginsberg had new poems I
    almost died, Allen Ginsberg who was the most perfect and the
    bravest and the best and the words were perfect beauty and
    perfect power and perfect pain and I carried them with me and
    read them, stunned and truly trembling inside because they
    went past all lies to something hidden inside; and I got back on
    the bus and I got back to Camden and I had the poems and
    someday it would be me. I wrote words out on paper and hid
    them because my mother would say they were dirty words; all
    the true words were dirty words. I wrote private, secret words
    in funny-shaped lines. Y ou could take the dark— the thick,
    mean, hard, sad dark— the gray cement, lonely as death, cold

    as death, stone cold, the torn skin, you on your knees your
    hands bleeding on the cold cement, and you could use words
    to say I am — I am, I want, I know , I feel, I see. N in o ’s knife,
    cold, on the edge o f m y skin down m y back, the cement
    underneath: I want, I know, I feel; then he tears you apart from
    behind, inside. Y ou could use words to say what it was and
    how it felt, the dark banging into you, pressing up against you,
    pinning you down, a suffocating mask over your face or a
    granite mountain pressing you under it, you’re a fossil, delicate,
    ancient, buried alive and perfectly preserved, some bones
    between the mountain and the level ground, pressed flat on the
    cement under the dark, the great, still, thick, heavy dark. Y ou
    could sing pain soft or you could holler; you could use the
    voices o f the dead i f you had to, the other skeletons pressed in
    the cement. Y ou could write the words on the cement blind in
    the dark, pushed on your knees, a finger dipped in blood; or
    pushed flat, the dark on you, the cement under you, N in o ’s
    knife touching the edge o f your skin. The poems said: Andrea,
    me too, I’m on m y knees, afraid and alone, and I sing ; I’m
    pushed flat, rammed, torn up, and I sing; I weep, I rage, I sing ; I
    hurt, I’m sad, I sing ; I want, I’m lost, I sing. Y ou learned the
    names o f things, the true names, short, abrupt, unkind, and
    you learned to sing them, your heart soared from them, the
    song o f them, the great, simple music o f them. The dark
    stayed dark and hard but now it had a sound in it, a bittersweet
    lyric, music carried on the edge o f a broken line. Then m y
    m omma 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 o ff the face o f the
    earth, she screamed she’d lock me up. I left on the bus to N ew
    Y ork . N o one’s locking me up. When the men said the names
    they whispered and touched you; and flat on the cement, still
    there were no locks, no