enter in. According to the w ay I saw life, I incarnated peace.
M aybe not so some understand it but in m y heart I was peace;
and I never thought any kind o f making love was war; make
love, not war; and when it was war on me I didn’t see it as such
per se; war was Vietnam. I never thought peace was bland; or I
should be insipid or just wait. Peace has its own drive and its
own sense o f time; you need backbone; and it wants to win—
not to have the last word but to be the last word; it’s fierce,
peace is; not coy, not pure, not simpering or whimpering, and
maybe it’s not always nice either; and I was a real peace girl
who got a lot o f it wrong maybe because staying alive was
hard and I did some bad things and it made me hard and I got
tough and tired, so tired, and nasty, sometimes, mean:
unworthy. W hy’d Gandhi put those young girls in his bed and
make them sleep there so he could prove he wouldn’t touch
them and he could resist? I never got nasty like that, where I
used somebody else up to brag I was someone good. There’s
no purity on this earth from ego or greed and I never set out to
be a saint. I like everything being all mixed up in me; I don’t
have quarrels with life like that; I accept w e’re tangled. In my
heart, I was peace. Once I saw a cartoon in The New Yorker,
maybe I was eighteen. It showed a bunch o f people carrying
picket signs that said “ Peace. ” And it showed one buxom
woman carrying a sign that said “ Piece. ” I hated that. I hated
it. But you cither had to be cowed, give in to the pig shit
behind that cartoon, or you had to disown it, disown the
dumb shit behind it. I disowned it all. I disowned it without
exception. I kept none o f it. I pushed it o ff me. I purged m y
world o f it. I disavowed anyone who tried to put it on me.
There couldn’t be this garbage between me and life; like some
huge smelly dump you had to trudge through or crawl
through to slide up against someone else who was also real.
And by the time you got to them you smelled like the garbage.
I said no. I said I will not. I said it is not on me. I said I may be
poor but I am not afraid. I said I want. I said I am not afraid to
pay. I said I will not shield myself. I said I will not pretend to
live life; I will live it. I said I will not apologize and I will not
lie. I said, if I die, I die. I was never afraid to die. I got tough in
some ways but I stayed soft inside the core o f m y belief where
there was tenderness for others, sometimes. I kept a caring
eye. I kept a caring heart. O ver the injury I still believed there
was love; not the love o f two but the love o f many. I still
believed in us, all o f us, us, if we could get free from rules and
obedience and being robots. I liked doing sabotage, I’m not
saying I had a pretty heart, I wasn’t a nice girl and I’m not
claiming it. I had some ruthlessness. I wasn’t easy to kill. I
could keep going. I wanted to live. I’m just saying I cared.
Why didn’t I kill him? Why didn’t I? I’m the most ardent
pacifist the world ever saw. And fuck meant all kinds o f
making love— it was a new word. It was fucking if you got
inside each other, or so near you couldn’t be pulled apart. It
was jo y and risk and fun and orgasm; not faking it; I never
have. It didn’t have to do with who put what where. It was all
kinds o f wet and all kinds o f urgent and all kinds o f here and
now, with him or her. It was you tangled up with someone,
raw. It wasn’t this one genital act, in out in out, that someone
could package and sell or that there was an etiquette for. It
wasn’t some imitation o f something you saw somewhere, in
porn or your favorite movie star saying how he did it. It was
something vast, filled with risk and feeling; feeling; personal
love ain’t the only feeling— there’s feelings o f adventure and
newness and excitement and Goddamn pure happiness—
there’s need and sorrow and loneliness and certain kinds o f
grief that turn easy into touching someone, wild, agitated,
everywhere— there’s just liking whoever it is and wanting to
pull them down right on you, they make you giddy, their
mere existence tickles you to death, you giggle and cheer them
on and you touch them— and there’s sensation, just that, no
morality, no higher good, no justification, just how it feels.
There’s uncharted waters, you ain’t acting out a script and
there’s no w ay past the present, you are right there in the
middle o f your own real life riding a wave a mile high with
speed and grace and then you are pulled under to the bottom o f
the world. The whole w orld’s alive, everything moves and
wants and loves, the whole w orld’s alive with promise, with
possibility; and I wanted to live, I said yes I want to live.
There’s not something new about wanting love in spite o f
knowing terror; or feeling love and having it push against
your thighs from inside and then those thighs carry you out
past safety into hell. There’s nothing new about wanting to
love a multitude. I was born on Mickle Street in Camden in
1946, down the street from Walt Whitman’s house. I grew up
an orphan sheltered by the passion o f his great heart. He
wanted everyone. He wanted them, to touch. He was forced,
by his time and place, into metaphor. He put it in poems, this
physicalized love that was universal, he named the kinds and
categories he wanted, men and women, he said they were
worthy, all, without exception, he said he wanted to be on
them and in them and he wanted them in him, he said it was
love, he said lam , he said lam and then he enumerated the ones
he wanted, he made lam synonymous with you are and we are.
Leaves of Grass is his lists o f lovers, us, the people, all o f us; he
used grandiose language but it was also common, vulgar; he
says I ant you and you and you, you exist, I touch you, I know
you, I see you, I recognize you, I want you, I love you, I am. In
the C ivil War he was devoted to wounded soldiers. He faced
the maiming and the mutilation, and he loved those boys:
“ (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d
and rested, /M any a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded
lips. )” It was before surgeons washed their hands, before
Lister, and legs were sawed off, sutures were moistened with