"I felt awful last night.
I slept by myself, and I was so lonely.
I actually heard myself talking in my sleep.
This was the dream.
There was an old store being moved out of.
It was full of piles of sodden old rags
and burnt pieces of gauze, and ribbons and dark plaster
lathing.
And I suddenly realized that it was a bridal shop.
And in the dream, I thought it was a perfect symbol
for what my soul is now.
There was a bride still there, gleaming
in the middle of everything.
And the old ladies who ran the place, came out to us and said,
OK, it's yours now.
And that's when I heard myself out loud saying, fuck you.
What do you mean mine, old bitches?
I was still asleep, shouting all that.
But then something made me laugh to myself,
and that's what finally woke me up.
I laid there for a long time, still laughing
and promised myself to be sure to remember everything
for today.
And I do, but if it was so funny during the night, how come
I feel so utterly like shit today?
How come everything this morning feels
as though it looks like me?
My typewriter, my cup, the whole room is me with my skull off.
And why do I feel as though I'll never be in love again,
and I won't be able to stand the rest of my life in front of me
without love?
What did that old store really mean?
Why did I think in the dream it was such a good symbol for me?
I can almost smell how all the crap stank in the gloom?
What did the bride mean?
Is it somebody I love?
Is it the last thing inside myself I haven't destroyed yet?
And if so, what is it?
What does it stand for?
It would be better to be invisible than this.
To fog into something, and just stay there.
I'm not going to move today.
I'm not going to eat or think.
I'm going to sit here and try to keep
the picture of that crumbling building with the bride dummy
in it in my mind, until something happens.
Maybe somebody will come tonight, to see where I am.
Maybe they'll take me in their arms,
and pull my head down onto their breasts
and I'll imagine I'm real.
And the world will cry ferociously
against my new mouth, and we'll fuck hard
and let it all end right there.
Imagine somebody who's torn his balls and his cock off.
There they are in your hand like dolls,
like something from a wedding cake.
Lovers, man and wife browned and fragile.
The bodies fattened and foreshortened
like real peoples.
The women who took them held them down by her crotch
and laughed, and who had them next,
licked them and licked them.
I could see her tasting the sour flakes, the tiny morning
coat of the man raveling off onto her lips
and sticking limply.
They were toys is all.
The child of whom has died ages before this,
and the new child squashes it and vomits it.
Something the past has thrown out of itself.
The two people more wounded and more sexual.
The man howling for his woman, and the woman howling back.
Dead things eating the dead.
The flesh churning, and ripping to keep life long
after there's no consciousness.
Feed, fuck, crush the dead things.
I can't do it anymore.
I can't bear it anymore."
Actually when those people got up to leave,
I thought maybe they were leaving because
of some of the language in the poem, which
would be nice actually.
We have this feeling that anything that's hard is OK.
When I started using language like cock and cunt,
I thought of it primarily as a source
of sort of personal salvation.
That using the other language like penis and vagina,
sounds like too little southern ladies.
[LAUGHTER]
That it was my own sexual salvation.
But now it's very apparently a political act,
because if you're in a culture that uses euphemisms,
then you end up with things like protective reaction
and incursion, and the whole vocabulary of horror
that we've developed.