Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page B

not strong enough,” I said, tilting his head back. The sounds of nurses and hospital gurneys far away in the halls but he said nothing—his dark eyes just staring and flickering back and forth from side to side in strobic motion. Was he sleeping? Was he dreaming? What thoughts lay behind them? What pictures forming? Do blind men have visual dreams, dreams of color, dreams of form?
    After giving birth a female whale produces more than two hundred gallons of milk a day.
    In the yellowing dusk the red bricks of the buildings go to sleep; they fade into the shadows of streets and only the uppermost windows show the slow night coming on. I can place myself out there in the sky: lie down in the texture and dream of years and years of sleep and I talk inside my head of change and of peace for this body beside me of life for this body beside me of belief in these unalterable positions in the shifting state of things; of disbelief, of need for something to suddenly and abruptly take place, like that last image of some Antonioni film where the young woman looks at the house her father built and because of her gaze it explodes not once but twice in slow motion, huge fireballs of rupturing gas lines and couches and tables and chairs splintering into waves of shards and light and glass drifting in glittering helixes and even the entire contents of the family refrigerator lovingly spilling out toward the eye in rage, a perfect rage that I was beginning to understand, seeing myself hovering in the atmosphere outside the building’s walls and wanting a shout to come from my throat that would level all the buildings or else have a strength in my hands where I could rip open the earth like cheap fabric and release a windscreen of lava and heat or with the fists banging against my thighs create Shockwaves that would cause all the manufacturing of the preinvented world to go tumbling down in a slow and terrifying beauty till all the earth was level or maybe just to have some water pour from my head.
    First there is the World. Then there is the Other World. The Other World is where I sometimes lose my footing. In its calendar turnings, in its preinvented existence. The barrage of twists and turns where I sometimes get weary trying to keep up with it, minute by minute adapt: the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of barren wilderness from the human step. A place where by virtue of having been born centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in metallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien. But there’s the World where one adapts and stretches the boundaries of the Other World through keys of the imagination. But then again, the imagination is encoded with the invented information of the Other World. One stops before a light that turns from green to red and one grows centuries old in that moment. Someone once said that the Other World was run by a different species of humans. It is the distance of stepping back or slowing down that reveals the Other World. It’s the dislocation of response that reveals it for the first time because the Other World gets into one’s bloodstream with the invisibility of a lover. It slowly takes the shape of the cells and their growth, internalized until it becomes an extension of the body. Traveling into primitive cultures allows one a sudden and clear view of the Other World; how the invention of the word “nature” disassociates us from the ground we walk on. While growing up I was constantly aware of the sense of all this in the same way one experiences a vague fear yet can’t distill the form of it from the table or the cup one is holding or the skies rolling beneath the window frames.
    Ever since