Food For Thought

A Collection of Heretical Notions and Wretched Adages
compiled by Jack Tourette

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The print version of this has only a small fraction of the power delivered by David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) in the recorded version of "The Collapse of the Illusory One Tribe Nation" from ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion), 1992, by David Wojnarowicz and Ben Neill:

"If I had a dollar to spend for healthcare 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 afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can't even remember what his 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 the governor of Texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that 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 re-elections 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 healthcare 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 anti-violence 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 non-violent resistance but the 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 and 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 healthcare 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 and 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.

© 1999 by MonkeyPants Press, an imprint of Bonobo Books, a division of Consolidated Trout, Ltd.
Last update: 03-July-2015
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