The Truth by Geoff Rips
excertp from Chapter One, I Explain Myself
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     Sometimes people call me crazy. They say I belong with those who are insane and wandering through themselves. I tell them I already live there. I do that so they’ll laugh and forget I’m here. I do that so they’ll no longer see me and the twisted angles from which I view the world. I do that so they’ll leave me to myself. But I also do that because it’s not entirely untrue either. And I don’t mean this whorehouse is different from the rest of the world in that regard. On the contrary, from the moment we take our mother’s milk we are all infected with the syphilitic nature of this world. That’s what kills you. It’s not the cancer or the old age or someone’s bullet. It’s the venereal disease of life itself that claims you in the end. So when they tell me, Chuy, you are crazy, I say, I don’t deny it. My madness is proceeding at its proper speed, I tell them. The speed of life and death is the proper speed, I say. And they laugh and walk off saying I am crazy. And I don’t deny it. I know who I am.
     The rest of the people who live here almost never think about these things the way they occur to me sitting for so long in the contagion of my own bones. But I think they would agree with me. I know this is the case with Angelita, whose hands could heal the wound of death itself, because I have discussed it with her, though she laughs all the time that we’re talking, all the time that she’s working out the barbs from the wire fence of my spine. She laughs but I know that she’s listening because she’s always listening. And she’s thinking, too, like the time she told me that life means more to her because it is just out of reach than it would mean if she could hold it in her hands. And I know the Midwife thinks about these things because she’s the one who makes sure the thick ball of the world is always sitting in our front room no matter what journeys into heaven or dances into hell are going on in the upstairs rooms. Many times I’ve seen her sitting surrounded by the business of the night, lost far inside herself. She’s told me what she’s found herself thinking at these times—what it’s like to bring life out of the darkness of a woman’s womb in her office as a midwife, what it’s like to preside over the configurations that men and women make looking for a way out through the shadows of the rooms of the second floor, what it’s like to taste the world forever with the dark lips of a whore.

From the first chapter of The Truth by Geoff Rips

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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