I’m sitting in his hospital room so high in the upper reaches of the building that when I walk the halls or sit in the room or wander to the waiting room to have a cigarette, it’s the gradual turn of the earth outside the windows, the distant plains filled with buildings that have a look of fiction because from this perspective they flatten out against one another on into the distance until there are thousands of windows (each containing at least one human being that shows no signs of life) it’s all looking like small models of a train set against postcard-perfect reproductions of late winter skies and sunsets; the yellowing sparse clouds and miniature water tanks. And leaning against the glass of the window of his room I can see dizzily down into the street and wonder what it is to fall such distances. I’m afraid he’s really dying. When we brought him in here it was just for some routine tests because he wasn’t pissing for days and the slightest movement of an arm or leg brought nausea. Nausea. He was expected to stay for only two or three days and it’s been a week now and he barely opens his eyes for more than a few seconds. And I came into the room this morning, the door swinging open to pale light and that steady figure outlining the sheets. His breath was coming in rapid-fire bursts like a machine gun. I turn from the silence and the window and look at him and an iris appears beneath one half-lifted eyelid and its strength bores right through me. And I turn away almost embarrassed having as much life in me as he hasn’t. The iris was the size of the room; it dwarfed the winter light filling the streets outside the window; it radiated across the heavy clouds with fifty thousand windows reflecting the blue sky through it. Whales can descend to a depth of five thousand feet where they can and must sustain a pressure of one hundred and forty tons on every square foot of their bodies. He seemed to wake for a moment; he drifted soundlessly for a while, and then asked me in sounds that took five minutes to translate to help him into the nearby bathroom so he could shit or something. I manipulated the machinery in the structure of the bed so that his upper body rose toward me and his legs sank away. I placed my hands beneath his back, it was hot and sweaty, and I pulled him into a sitting position, took one paralyzed leg after the other pulling them over the sides of the bed. Then I realized he was going nowhere. He was limp and his eyes were closed and his mouth against my arm breathing wet sounds. And I felt my body thrumming with the sounds of vessels of blood and muscles contracting the sounds of aging and of disintegration – the sound of something made ridiculous with language – the sense of loving and the sense of fear. I looked into his face, I looked into his face; the irises expanding and filling the room, the curtains of eyelids shutting down again and again. I tried to explain that he was too weak to make the trip three feet away to the bathroom. I was suddenly scared and embarrassed again. “I’m 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, 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 those eyes? What pictures forming? Do blind men have visual dreams, 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. And looking out the windows I can place myself out there in the sky; lie down in that texture and dream of years and years of sleep and I talk, 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 the unalterable positions and the shifting state of things; of disbelief, of disbelief and of need for suddenly, something to suddenly and abruptly take place, this need for something to shift, like that last, 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 one 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, even the entire contents of the family refrigerator lovingly spilling out toward the eye in rage, 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, a shout that would level all the buildings or else have the strength in my hands where I could rip open the earth like a 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 or maybe or maybe just to have some water pouring from my head.

I saw her, I saw her in mexico city after a day of walking around the outskirts of the upper-class zone. 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, 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. I saw her. I saw her and 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.

When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and the texture and simultaneous I, and simultaneously, and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappear from around the organs and detach itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gleaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly revolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open your body and slip up inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of you, of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep, it makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. When I was diagnosed with this virus it didn’t take me long to realize I’d contracted a diseased society as well. Meat, blood, memory, war. We rise to greet the state, to confront the state. Smell the flowers while you can. Meat, blood, memory, war. We rise to greet the state, to confront the state. Smell the flowers while you can. We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies and within that illusion of a one-tribe nation there are real tribes. Some of the tribes are in the business of sucker-punching people’s psyches in the form of maintaining the day-to-day job of government—they sell the masses a pile of green-tainted meat; i.e., a corrupted and false history as well as a corrupted and false future, and although that meat stinks of rot and pus and blood, this particular tribe extols these foul emissions as if they were virtues made of glorious sensitivities: "Raise Ole Glory while we do it to them again ... " Then there are other tribes which work hand in hand with the government, offering slices of meat in the form of doubletalk; or hope—hope as a chain of submission. Then there are the tribes that suckle at the breast of telecommunications every evening after work and are fatally lulled into society's deep sleep. Day after day they experience waking nightmares but they've either bought the con of language from the tribe that holds out hope, or they're too fucking exhausted or fearful to break through the illusion and examine the structures of their world. Then there are other tribes that experience the x-ray of Civilization every time they leave the house or turn on the tv set or radio or pick up a newspaper or suddenly realize their legs have automatically come to a halt before a red traffic light. A civil war and a national trial for the leaders of this country, as well as certain leaders in organized religions, is the war that plays and replays in the heads of members of that tribe. And it’s a volume of that war that sometimes reaches epic dimensions and when the person hearing it realizes they’re walking in the streets and subways full of thousands of people who appear deaf to the sound of it, and the person hearing it fails to connect with another member of the same tribe who can acknowledge that sound, that person can one day find themselves at the top of a water tower in suburbia armed with a high-powered rifle and firing indiscriminately at the ants crawling around below. That person can one day find themself running amok in the streets with a handgun; that person can one day find themself lobbing a grenade at the forty-car motorcade of the president; or that person can end up on a street corner, homeless hungry and wild-eyed, punching himself in the face or sticking wires through the arms of their flesh and chest.

This is a country of planes, trains, and automobiles. AIDS is accelerating in small towns and cities because the inhabitants of those places believe a number of things: one: that this virus has a sexual orientation and a moral code. two: that the virus obeys borders and stays within large urban centers. three: that if the person you fuck is sweet and kind and sexy, they could not possibly have AIDS. One in four people in the Bronx are HIV positive. There are ten thousand people with AIDS living on the streets of New York. The Vatican says it’s a more terrible thing to use a condom than to get or develop AIDS. AIDS is up 40% among teenagers in just two years. One in every twenty-five babies born in Brooklyn are HIV positive. Cardinal O’Connor says that all people, regardless of persuasion, if they refuse the teachings of the Catholic Church and contract AIDS they only have themselves to blame.

If I had a dollar If I had a dollar give give give it to If I had a dollar give it If I had a dollar give give it to a If I had a dollar give give give it to a well well If I had a dollar give it to a well well If I had a dollar give it to a well well If I had a dollar for health care give it to well well give it to a If I had a dollar give give it to a well well give it to a well give it to a If I had a dollar So this car from Jersey cruises by and the kids come around all the time throwing bottles and screaming “QUEER! QUEER!” so this car cruises by and we all saw it and this kid leans out the window and says “Suck my dick!” My friend flipped him the finger and says something and all of a sudden the car slams on the brakes and five kids come piling out the doors and start kicking the shit out of my friend. For the next ten minutes about a hundred guys came out of the bars and from around the corner and they’re surrounding the five guys beating the shit out of my friend–his friend took off right away and later my friend found out that he’d just run home, didn’t bother calling the cops or nothing. And all these guys crowding around watching five guys beat up one guy and none of them said or did a fucking thing. My friend said they’re stomping on his chest and legs and breaking a lot of his ribs stomping on his head and his chest. At one point he gets up, he could hardly feel them hitting him and jumping up and down on his head and arms and legs. He finally said he remembers jumping up plowing through the crowd and running and running and running and running. The kids chased after him but he ran faster and faster passing through the streets and out of the neighborhood. He kept running until he collapsed on a side street. If I had a dollar give it to a If I had a dollar give it to a If I had a dollar give it to a well give it to a If If I had a dollar to spend for health care give it to a “If I had a dollar to spend for health care I'd rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS” says the health-care official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour-long program of people dying on camera because they can't even afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can't even remember what this official looked like because I reached in through the tv screen and ripped his face in half. And I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country. “If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers” says a governor in Texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims the governor was only joking and didn’t know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn’t think it would hurt his chances for reelection anyways and I wake up every morning and I wake up every morning and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blow darts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government health-care officials or those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs there’s a thin line a very thin line between the inside and the outside and I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on people’s lips; the religious types outside st. patrick’s cathedral shouting to the men and women in the gay parade, “You won’t be here next year - you’ll get AIDS and die ha ha…” and the areas of the u.s.a. where it is possible to murder a man and when brought to trial one only has to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free and the difficulties that a bunch of republican senators have in albany with supporting an antiviolence bill that includes “sexual orientation” as a category of crime victims there’s a thin line a very thin line as each T-cell disappears from my body it’s replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into nonviolent resistance but that focus is starting to slip the focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack america america america seems to understand and accept murder as a self-defense against those who would murder other people and it’s been murder on a daily basis for eight nine ten count them ten long years and we’re expected to pay taxes to support this public and social murder and we’re expected to quietly and politely make house in this windstorm of murder but I say there’s certain politicians that had better increase their security forces and there’s religious leaders and health-care officials that had better get bigger fucking dogs and higher fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer-bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the inside and the outside is beginning to erode and at the moment at the moment at the moment I’m a thirty-seven foot tall one-thousand-one-hundred-seventy-two pound man inside this six-foot body and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release. Well give it to a If I had a dollar well if I had a dollar give give give it to a well well