Free Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz Page B

hazy coastline with teeth of red factories and an incidental gas tank explosion which sends flowers of black smoke reeling up into the dusk. I could feel his lips against mine from across the room, tasting reefer or milk on them as he disappears through a square hole in the ceiling. I watch as his legs and feet leave the rungs of the metal ladder following his hips through that dark space, the soles of his sneakers floating effortlessly in the opening for a second, then shifting out of view. I followed his motions pulling myself up two rungs at a time and as my head cleared the ceiling I saw him recede farther back in the attic crawlspace. The horizontal red lines of his shirt become dark and indistinct, just the pale rose of his arms still luminous. He turned and leaned up against the wall at a point where a crack in the roof let light pass through illuminating the wall and his head like some old russian icon of a saint in mausoleum darkness. Like him I had to crouch in order to move through the narrow space, walking along the tops of spaced beams like a horizontal ladder so as not to tip and crash through the rotting tin ceiling. I bumped my head a couple of times on unseen pipes and finally reached him. His hands slid from his pockets and over the front of my trousers moving back and forth until there was swelling. My hands drifted over and repeated the actions over his crotch and like water falls from the sky I leaned in close and slid down and unsnapped his jeans button by button using only my teeth. He was wearing no underwear and I peeled back the flaps of his trousers, his dick falling neatly out to rest on my lips. It was uncircumcised, slim and warm. I passed my face underneath it, wetting it slightly, teasingly, finally taking it into my mouth and sliding my hands upward beneath his shirt; the lines of it rippling like water and I felt the downy sensation of hair beneath my palms. His chest was hard: rippling stomach, the curve of it in dim light, the brown heat of his belly against my forehead. His hands slipped softly down my collar and kneaded the muscles of my back, my neck and finally he made a rushing sound with his breath and he came. I could feel it jetting in warm streams hitting the back of my throat: warm liquid sensation. Felt good. Nothing but the energy in his hands speaking with me.
    two . So I’m watching this thing move around in my environment, among friends and strangers: something invisible and abstract and scary; some connect-the-dots version of hell only it’s not as simple as hell. It’s got no shape yet or else maybe I’m just blind to it or we’re just blind to it or else it is just invisible until all the dots are connected. Draw a line from here to there to there to here with all the dots being people you see from miles up in the air or from the ledge of a tall building or the window of a small plane but it’s still not that easy, not that abstract because you can’t shut out the smell of rotting. You can’t shut out the sound of it: the sound of the man standing on the sidewalk trying to scream that he’s going to throw himself in front of the passing automobiles because he wants to stop that slowly drawn line approaching him from the distance with all the undeniability of a slow train carrying sixteen tons of pressure; with all the measure and intent of crushing him but the guy is too weak to even get this amount of control over his life, he can’t even throw a fit the proper way. You can’t shut out the sights and sounds of death, the people waking up with the diseases of small birds or mammals; the people whose faces are entirely black with cancer eating health salads in the lonely seats of restaurants. Those images hurl themselves from the corners of a fast-paced city and you can’t even imagine death properly enough to tell this guy you understand what he’s railing against. I mean, hell, on the first day that he found out he had