Free Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page A

in a state of perpetual freedom. It’s the preferable sensation of arriving at a movie fifteen minutes late and departing twenty minutes later and retrieving an echo of real life as opposed to a tar pit sensation. Destination is an entry point for the practitioners of the fake moral screens.
    Forty miles outside of town, drifting through a section of countryside controlled by the marine corps air station, I’m beginning to experience the slow withdrawal from population. My body is going through slender jitters inside all the space outside the enclosed windows of the car and I feel something concrete slipping off a ledge back there behind my eyes. I was up until this moment a member of the industrialized tribe—the illusory tribe that catapults this nation, this society, into something thick and hallucinogenic. The hand with the cigarette is slowly making its way back across the hip of the horizon. Its slow-motion drift creates a dark spot below it like a cloud shadow on the landscape that travels at the same speed. The hand with the cigarette is drifting for hours back to my waiting lips. What is it in these wrists that grab the steering wheel? What blood flows through these arms and hands? What color and sensibility in that blood? What textures and images are coded and locked into those genes, those cells, those bones that drag the world toward my eyes? What do these eyes have. to do with surveillance cameras? What do the veins running through my wrists have in common with electric wiring? I’m the robotic kid with caucasian kid programming trying to short-circuit the sensory disks. I’m the robotic kid looking through digital eyes past the windshield into the preinvented world. I’m the robotic kid gone haywire in the sudden mounds and coils of krazy-kat landscapes. I’m the robotic kid lost for a fraction of evolutionary time in the outskirts of tribal boundaries; I’ve slipped through the keyhole of an enormous psychic erector set of a child civilization. I’m the robotic kid lost from the blind eye of government and wandering the edges of a computerized landscape; all civilization is turning like one huge gear in my forehead. I’m seeing my hands and feet grow thousands of miles long and millions of years old and I’m experiencing the exertion it takes to move these programmed limbs. I’m the robotic kid, the human motor-works, and surveying the scene before me I wonder: What can these feet level? What can these feet pound and flatten? What can these hands raise?

BEING QUEER IN AMERICA
    A Journal of Disintegration
    one . I’m walking through these hallways where the windows break apart a slow dying sky and a quiet wind follows the heels of the kid as he suddenly steps through a door frame ten rooms down. A quiet and simple grace in his arms and legs as the doorways fold out to produce more doorways and it’s all some barbershop vision of mirrors with the wall ending at the distance of sky: small sparks of airplanes in that late blue and yellow and these little black pills stirring like small bees in my belly. The kid passed me earlier in the street about a mile away by the black shiny fence of a church: wrought-iron spikes topped with deadly blades part zulu. But now it’s just the sun piercing the waters of a viridian sea; his eyes set in the pale white face, arms a pale shade of red—something monkey, something borneo. His eyes make him look like he’s starving for food or just feeling lust or else he’s got the look of one of those spiritual types that hover on street corners trying to waylay and sweet-talk some passive kid into a lifetime of psychic control.
    If viewed from miles above, this place would just appear to be a small boxlike structure like thousands of others set down along the lines of the rivers in the world; the only difference being that in this one the face of the kid starts moving up the wall past a window framing the perfect