Andrea Dworkin - Mercy

fail to do one whole push-up twice in a night, two times a

week; and I have to come up with a stupendous amount o f

money, because it is fifteen dollars a class, so that is fifteen

times four, and Sensei berates me when I say I will have to take

a single class twice a week for a month or two or even three

because I cannot find the money to pay for double classes; I feel

m y serious w ord that this is so is enough but she takes it as if I

am lying or I don’t value her or I don’t have devotion, as if it’s

an excuse; and I feel enraged; because it’s as if she’d turn me out

for her fucking money, if you want it you can get it she says

like any pimp on the street; I am a writer, I am going to hurt

men, I am a serious person; she knows it. Sensei says she’s

never seen anyone with a will like mine but it’s a trick to flatter

me so I’ll be persuaded to get the money for double classes

after I’ve said I can’t and I’m feeling the indignity because I am

pure will and I have not insulted her by uttering one frivolous

word. I am engaged in the serious jo b o f survival and the

creation o f a plan to stop men; hurt them, stop them, kill them;

and I am not some fool who says insubstantial things and I

don’t have money to m ove around, as if I can take it from

something I don’t need, which I feel is an indignity to have to

explain, and I feel rage because she is middle-class in this w ay

that demeans me and the dojo’s in a Victorian brownstone she

owns with her lover, a woman with round shoulders and

sagging breasts who does not do sit-ups or horse position

standing up; there is a sudden horror in my heart, a queasy

feeling o f sickness and dread, because I ask her to be sober and

treat me with honor and she degrades me because o f money

and I cannot forgive it. I am learning that inside something

goes w rong when something w rong happens; I am learning to

follow it, the feeling. I say I write and it is first and I have thirty

dollars I can find, not sixty, and I do not say how much I give

up to give her the thirty because to do so would be demeaning

in m y heart, the sick feeling would come on, and she belittles

me and I leave and I never turn back. D o not mess with me. I

am making a plan in writing to make the men shed tears o f

remorse and I cannot waste m y time with someone insufficient; she has to deserve me too; I want respect; there’s a piece missing in her— what’s hunger, what’s poor; it’s the pieces I

got; I can’t explain how what’s a blind spot in her blindsides

me; I can’t have her talk money to me which she measures one

w ay and I measure in sucking dicks, the economy as I see it,

how long on your knees, how many times, equals a meal,

makes the rent. I ain’t saying it to her, it’s an inchoate rage, but

I turn over inside; Sensei eats shit. I say nothing, because she’s

an innocent, she counts money dry, not drenched in sperm. I

cut her o ff without another word. She is out o f my life. I don’t

look back. I paid, sister, I am paid up in dues well into the next

century, I have clear priorities, she was number two, pretty

high on the fucking list; number one is that I am writing a plan

for revenge, a justice plan, a justice poem, a justice map, a

geography o f justice; I am martial in my heart and military in

my mind; I think in strategy and in poems, a daughter o f

Guevara and Whitman, ready to take to the hills with a cosmic

vision o f what’s crawling around down on the ground; a

daughter with an overview; the big view; a daughter with a

new practice o f righteous rage, against what ain’t named and

ain’t spoken so it can’t be prosecuted except by the one it was

done to who knows it, knows him; I’m inventing a new

practice o f random self-defense; I take their habits and

characteristics seriously, as enemy, and I plan to outsmart

them and win; they want to stay anonymous, monster

shadows, brutes, king pricks, they want to strike like lightning, any time, any place, they want to be sadistic ghosts in the dark with penises that slice us open, they want us dumb and

mute and vacant, robbed o f words, nothing has a name, not

anything they do to us, there’s nothing because w e’re nothing;

then they must mean they want us to strike them down,

indiscriminate, in the night; we require a sign language o f

rebellion; it’s the only chance they left us. Y ou may find me

one who ain’t guilty but you can’t find me two. I have a vision,

far into the future, a plan for an arm y for justice, a girls’ army,

subversive, on the ground, down and dirty, no uniforms, no

rank, no orders from on high, a martial spirit, a cadre o f

honor, an arm y o f girls spreading out over the terrain, I see

them m oving through the streets, thick formations o f them in

anarchy and freedom on cement. I keep practicing horse

position and sit-ups and I kick good; I can kick to the knee and

I can kick to the cock but I can’t kick to the solar plexus and I

can’t kick his fucking head o ff but I can compensate with my

intelligence and with m y right thinking if I can isolate it, in

other words, rescue it from the nightmares; liberate it; deep

liberation. I practice on m y wall to get m y kick higher, never

touching the wall, Zen karate, a new dimension in control and

a new level o f aggression, a new arena o f attack as if I am

walking up the wall without touching it; and I will do the same

to them; Zen killing. M y fist ain’t good enough but m y thighs

needless to say are superb, possibly even sublime, it’s been

noted many times. M any a man’s died his little death there and

I made the mistake o f not burying him when he was exactly

ripe for it, not putting him, whole, under the ground, but I

soaked up his soul, I took it like they always fear, I stole his

essence to in me, it’s protein, I got his molecules; and I never

died. It is more than relevant; it is the point. I never died. I am

not dead. If you use us up and use us up and use us up but don’t

kill us we ain’t dead, boys; a word to the wise; peace now, or

there’s a mean lot o f killing coming. I am torn up in many

places and I am a m oving mountain o f pain, I have tears body

and soul, I am marked and scarred and black-and-blue inside

and out, I got torn muscles in m y throat and blood that dried

there that w o n ’t ever dislodge and rips in m y vagina the size o f

fists and fissures in m y anus like rivers and holes in m y heart, a