by Kathy Acker
that’ll bring you nightmares and fears
or worse,
lest I make a nightmare that’ll take you away from me.
The windows turned-different-ways the moon running before
the moon flickering light delaying the world
(here unreality):
long beams your eyes revealed
and you said on that soft fixed bed arms:
‘ARE YOU COMING BACK TO MY BED,
I KNOW YOU’RE COMING TO HARM ME,
ONLY ’CAUSE SOME GUY COVERED YOU WITH HIS SPERM
AND THEN REJECTED YOU?
WHERE D’YOU SPEND THE NIGHT
(’CAUSE OBVIOUSLY YOU HAD NO DESIRE TO COME HOME UNTIL
I DIED)?
I WISH YOU WOULD KNOW THIS NIGHTLY AGONY.
I WISH THE TABLES WERE TURNED!
JUST A FEW MINUTES AGO I WAS TRYING TO WAIT UP FOR YOU BY WATCHING TV
THEN BY WRITING POEMS
THEN BY COMPLAINING
THAT YOU CARE FOR EVERYONE ELSE BUT ME
THAT YOU COME HOME ONLY WHEN YOU HAVE TO
FINALLY FORGETFULNESS SWEPT HER ARMS ACROSS ME,
OBLIVION IS THE ONLY CURE FOR AGONY.’
The diseased
I want all of you out there to shut up.
I’m going to live the ways we want to live.
What do you want of me now?
Liver, blood, guts?
The only thing left is madness.
You too’re gonna drive yourself to the pits:
You’re gonna walk on coals through blazing fires:
You’re gonna drink down the world’s most painful poisons:
That’s what wanting love is.
My man isn’t like other men.
He can keep you in prison.
He can make you do anything.
I know why all of you want him.
But worse, what happens
if my Slave Trader
for some stupid reason
happens to like you?
Then you’re screwed:
no more sleep.
Nor will he let you keep your eyes.
He compulsions alone can fetter forces wildness.
How many times a spineless being you’ll run to
all the weaky friends you formerly despised,
tremulous sorrow will arise with tears shuddering
warts and pimples and fleas’ll appear on your skin
all your wishes’ll go, words are no more,
you’ll never again know who you are.
You’ll learn to serve him, girl, to be whatever he wants,
to disappear whenever he wants you to go.
You’ll learn why people who want, want to die
why the whole world are lies.
Your rich parents ain’t helping:
cause Love’s more powerful than social climbing.
But if even small you have given footsteps of your failure
how quickly from such a reputation you will be a murmur!
Not I then I will be able comfort to bear to asking you
’Cause I’m sick too.
At this point sicker than you.
My disease is forever.
I know no comfort.
Since we’re both maniacs,
let’s be nice to each other.
I myself want to live.
I want to burn.
all I ask is no one loves me
in return.
But living is luxury
What does it help to go without life, hair
and in thin silk to move slink around,
why from the Persian trees perfumed arm-pits myrhh
you sell in these exotic yourself wares
your natural and self as you throw away art and culture?
Believe me, no your there’s bettering figure
Love does not take tricks bare.
Love does not take tricks bare
Love is nowhere
Love is nowhere to be found
Wings are falling to the ground.
Not thus Castor Phoebe set on fire,
His brother by working not her sister,
Not by working Idas, and the horny source of discord to Sun
Marpessa finally away from her parents’ home
no the Phrygian by fake she captured glitter a husband
dragged away by alien wheels:
not to those eagerness all the time to get control of men:
to them more than enough the form honesty.
But you’re not honest
so I’m scared
you think I’m as cheap
as you are.
Love loves luxuries,
entwining and pleasant ways,
May lingering dreams bring happiness all your days.
To Slave trader
Are you really crazy, doesn’t you my love mean anything to?
Do you think I’m than icy more frigid Illyria?
To you so valuable, whoever she is, does that girl seem
That without me controlled by the winds to go you want?
You hear can the raging of oceans under bridges,
brave? on hard cold floor how to sleep you can know?
you, delicate and scared, survive chills and frosts
you can, not used to the slightest snow?
Let winter’s be double the length of solstice
let be dead ’cause of late the sailors Pleiades
let no your from the Tyrrhenian be freed ropes muck
let not unfriendly my throw away winds pleas!
But, let there be no double winter dead winds,
if you on a speeding carry away the waves ship
from me prisoned on this empty and allow shore
you horror with clenched to threaten wrist.
But whatever happens whatever I, horror, you owe,
I hope Galatea brings you luck
may be sailed-by Ceraunian cliffs by oar felicitous
let in Oricos with calmness.
Me no one will take away from you
but I, life, in front of your house bitter puss will keep screaming
and not I may fail every sailor to ask passing-by,
‘Tell me, in what port in prison my boy is?’
and I will cry, ‘It’s possible on Atracian he’s set down shores
or it’s possible in Hylaeia, he my future is.’
Janey wrote the following poems by herself
A throw of the dice never will abolish chance
I don’t want nothing no more
I just wanna be left alone
I don want no cancer in my bones
All you people in the streets
You don wanna marry me
I don’t know what or who’s happening
I don’t feel like this no no I don
I care about loving I care about friends
Somewhere in me maybe I do
I’ve gotten really bored with my dreams
Heat disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the street get away from me
Well tell me what excites me
Well tell me what’s important
I got nowhere to go to
There’s no where that I want
Every time I want someone
it’s just a dream
Everything I want is a dream
And dreams stink more than anything
Heart disease syphilis pregnancy
All you creeps on the streets get away from me
No No No No No No NO NO NO
No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No
No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
No No No No No No No No No No
Oh suck my cock honey suck my cock
That’s what it’s all about
I love how you turn yourself
Around and upside-down inside-out
for me
just for me
Oh I know
I must taste sweet
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
SUCK ME SUCK ME SUCK ME
sex is sweet
now we’ve done with sex where we gonna go?
If you have no pleasure to live for, do you want to live?
grey grey everywhere grey
blucky blucky shiv
shifting shivers lurk in corners
corners of the nothing
everyone walking down the corridors
they think they are the outside.
in the corners there lurk
wars and poisons and liars and dirt
Just let me sleep under warmth crawl my eyes
Here is my lullabye:
If you have no mind to live for do you
want to live?
Now stars lights up my head
I want the whole world to burn up instantly
I want everyone and thing to be dead
And then there’ll be, not begin, another world
Or so I’ve heard it said
I don’t know.
Don’t ask me nothing. I don’t know. I’m in pain. Ask me something. I’m tell you I hurt. I don’t have any other answers.
I like fire.
I like glory.
I like stars.
I like moving as fast fast as I can on a speeding train especially when I’m in pain
I like moving until I get beyond and I’m insane
meaning I can’t think anymore meaning I’m a robot meaning I’m a dodo meaning
I’m a creep meaning I’m stupid
This is one of my dreams.
It stinks ’cause it’s more prevalent than any thing.
What can we do for each other?
I don’t know.
Finally we go there
All alone.
What can we do for each other? We come back from that
loneliness and say
I’ve been there, I saw what I had to see and disappeared, it’s OK.
Life is totally totally lonely
No matter how bad things get on the streets
Poverty hypocrisy greed the world
Beauty joy honesty and all the rest
One side of the coin or the other
The only real thing is that split (second) between life and death.
excitement and danger and blackness
I have that feeling and I feel
really happy, more than sex and
love and wealth, I like danger
continuing unchanging calm danger.
like a marriage that doesn’t stop
only the whole world appears and disappears
and adventures pop up little blots
of madness, long stretches of nothing –
you don’t know where you’re at –
(Janey’s slave poem:
Why am I existing?
Just to be a slave?
List of my slave duties:
(1) Body slavery: I have to eat and get shelter so need money. Also my body likes sex and rich food and I’ll do anything for these.
(2) Mind slavery: I want more than just money. I live in a partially human world and I want people to think and feel certain ways about me. So I try to set up certain networks, mental-physical, in time and space to get what I want. (I also set up these networks to get money.) These networks become history and culture (if they work) and as such, turn against me and take away time and space. They tell me what to do.
The world I perceive, everything I perceive are indicators of my boring needs. Otherwise there’s nothing. I might as well not exist.
I don’t think I care about anything. All my emotions, no matter how passionate, are based on my needs.
So I can figure out at this point how to make enough money get enough people out of my life so I can relax sleep all the time every few days. Is there any other reason besides negativity?
Everything that has to do with this slave world makes me nauseous. All my emotions and ideas (i.e. depending on unstable ground for a decision: on any taste, on desire – that used to be the one I adored, on fascination, on conceptual ideas, on inspiration, etc) make me sick and I want to die because I don’t see anything else.
I don’t even adore my emotions anymore. Whatever the fuck they are.
Living locked-up in a slave trader’s room is easy. I mean you have the same emotions over and over again, the same thoughts, the same body, and after a while you see it’s all in your mind: you’re stuck to your mind. SLAVESLAVESLAVE.
The only thing I want is freedom. Let me tell you: I don’t have any idea what that means. Depending on someone/something who’s stable makes me happy. I don’t find the external world stable unlike Francis Ponge. To base myself (?) on who/that which is stable and to have no regard for anything else makes me happy.)
DEFIES WHAT IS: NOT LIFE, BUT OBLIVION
DEFIES DEFIES DEFIES NOT THOUGHT, BUT DEFIES
every howl of pain is a howl of defiance
every howl of pain is a howl of defiance
driven beyond all measure of success,
driven so there are no limits to what I do
this immeasurable eating, hunger, moving
desire to lose consciousness,
go to the end
as if there’s a beyond
driven beyond body desires into just desire,
not for what, just desire
DEFIANCE born
not made by environmental poverty
DEFIANCE SCORN BLOOD
(not just hallucination dispersed from agony – Mallarmé).
if this is the world DEFIANCE
would become the whole world DEFIANCE
the world would be a flame:
A TOTAL FLAME BURNING
ITSELF UP
BLOOD AND FEAR AND GUTS
MY VISION
This is my vision of agony.
I no longer have to give the details of agony
’Cause everyone knows what they hear and see.
howling about nothing, howling about howling,
driven up against the wall to break;
nothing, says Mallarmé, takes place
a lie, a fake ruin but
in these places
in which all reality turns into a howl and makes
itself go away
something happens:
Ghouls
There are such things as ghosts. Death does not all things end.
and pale yellow from vanquished even shades escape their graves.
You see, Jane my was seen to lean over bed,
though near the roar of just-buried Broadway,
as finally I was about to fall asleep realizing love
just dead, my bed and new reigns of chill and pain.
The same she had which she took with her to the grave hairs,
> the same eyes: one side of her dress was burned,
she had always worn on finger the ring its sapphire had eaten away fire,
surfaces Death’s had turned black her lips’ dirt.
Breathing and animation and these words she sent out: though
thumbbones were rattling her hands:
‘You lousy creep, though you’re the best can hope for a girl,
you already asleep how can?
Already you have forgotten our desperate crimes:
by my that nocturnal worn-down window thefts
through which dropped-down I to you by a rope hanging how many times
by the other snaking around your neck hand!
Often Our True Love occurred publicly; sex organs joined-up
made hot skins our streets.
Thou Love-Partnership Thou silent, whose obviously lying promises
not hearing has torn the deaf wind to pieces!
No man loved me, eyes, dying;
if you had loved me I could have gotten one more day.
Not even a priest gave a shit about my funeral,
but a broken brick fell on my dead brains.
‘You matter most of all: who saw you bent over with grief at the funeral?
Who saw your black clothes? Who saw you cry?
If it pains you so much to leave this city, even for a funeral,
you could have at least told my death-car to drive more slowly.
Why did you pray, I know you hate me, the winds to rage over my grave?
Why didn’t my grave smell of perfume?
Why didn’t the most expensive roses in the world cover my putrifying body?
And why didn’t you get all the priests in the world to try to mollify the demons
raging in the death-room?
You can’t manage to do anything. You’re a goon. This is what you gotta do:’
This poem was written about 2,000 years ago and is evidence of how things were and that nothing’s changed. The world, that is, thoughts, still stink.
‘Lydamus KILL – get WHITE HOT the KNIFE –
I saw how, as from POISON SLUSH WHITE the wine I drank,
Nonas SECRETLY COVERED UP CLEVER BITCH the taste:
let reveal TORTURES how she STANK.
SHE who up to a few days ago in CHEAP AS THEY COME was
SELLING her CUNT the NIGHTS
now in GOLD-AND-PURPLE GOWNS is DEIGNING TO STEP ON THE
DIRT
and is making my SERVANTS WORK their ASSES off,
so they won’t have time to REMEMBER even my appearance and
HER TO CURSE:
Just my cause Petale brought to my tomb some flowers,
STUCK PINS IN CHAINS ON SHIT has been the OLD WOMAN;
is BEATEN UP and Lalage by TWISTED HUNG HAIRS
name because she DARED to my mention.