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.
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