bicycling isn't just a matter of balance
it's a matter of faith.
You can keep upright only by moving forward.
You have to have your eyes on the goal, not the ground.
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves;
and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?
What is the ape to man?
A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment.
And man shall be just that for the overman:
a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…
the woman in Dear Abby who married a handsome successful mortician
on their wedding night, he made her soak in a tub of ice water until her skin was freezing to the touch, and then he made her lie in bed completely still while he had intercourse with her cold inert body.
this woman had done this as a newlywed, and gone on to do it for the next ten years of marriage
and now she was writing to Dear Abby to ask if Abby thought it meant something
The amazing miracle of death,
when one second you're walking and talking,
and the next second you're an object.
This was a man who moved like the gods were watching:
every gesture he made was upright and correct.
There was no one else it could be but Hector
Take a look around you
Someone might recognize you
It's not the type of place you wanna bump into friends
I know what you came for
To watch me on the dance floor
May get what you paid for
A part of your dreams
Now let me tell you why
You kiss your wife goodbye
You take a swig of brandy
And come here to me Getting satisfaction No negative reaction I'm playing with my body That's what you wanna see
But it's all right
Come on and see me every Saturday night
But it's all all right
And don't you know?
My hands along my thighs
You can't believe your eyes
My body hypnotizes
I'm a stripper!
So let the show begin
I'll show you everything
Under my safety pin
There's nothing you can say to take my pride away
I can be a lady and a stripper
I got ability
Don't you look down on me
I can live without your dirty minds
Can you?
Ha!
You men are all the same
Don't wanna know your name
Just come back again and pay the stripper
So let the show begin
I'll show you everything
Pulling off the safety pin
I got ability
Don't you look down on me
I only want your money
The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance.
Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right.
And minimum wage,
and varicose veins,
just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck,
instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say.
Yes, any way
you cut it,
but I've a choice
of how,
and I'll take the money.
I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads,
desire
or its facsimile.
Like jokes
or war,
it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worst suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal.
They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshipers!
That, or a bleary
hopeless love.
Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes,
and the urge to step on ants.
I keep the beat,
and dance for them because they can't.
The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August,
hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done already,
and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat,
and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tires me out the most.
This, and the pretense
that I can't hear them.
And I can't,
because I'm after all a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slam of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meaning are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mothers was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that?
You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.
Not that anyone here but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me and feel nothing.
Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look - my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.
