We all live in the city.
The city forms-often physically, but inevitably psychically-a circle.
A game.
A ring of death with sex at its center.
Drive toward outskirts of city suburbs.
At the edge discover zones of sophisticated vice and boredom, child prostitution.
But in the grimy ring immediately surrounding the daylight business district exists the only real
crowd life of our mound, the only street life, night life.
Diseased specimens in dollar hotels, low boarding houses, bars, pan shops, burlesques and
brothels, in dying arcades which never die, in streets and streets of all-night cinemas.
Baths, bars, the indoor pool.
Our injured leader prone on the sweating tile.
Chlorine on his breath and in his long hair.
Lithe, although crippled body of a middle-weight contender.
Near him the trusted journalist, confidant.
He liked men near him with a large sense of life.
But most of the press were vultures descending on the scene for curious America aplomb.
Cameras inside the coffin interviewing worms.
The assassin (?)
in flight
gravitated with unconscious, instinctual insect ease
mothlike, toward a zone of safety
haven from the swarming streeets
Quickly, he was devoured in the warm dark silent maw of the physical theater
Everything is vague and dizzy
The skin swells and there is no more distinction between parts of the body
An encroaching sound of threatening, mocking, monotonous voices
This is fear and attraction of being swallowed
Inside the dream, button sleep around your body
like a glove. Free now of space and time. Free
to dissolve in the streaming summer.
Crisp hot whiteness
City Noon
Occupants of plague zone
are consumed.
(Santa Ana's are winds off deserts.)
Rip up grating and splash in gutters.
The search for water, moisture,
"wetness" of the actor, lover.
The bird or insect that stumbles into a room
and cannot find the window. Because they know
no "windows."
Wasps, poised in the window,
Excellent dancers,
detached, are not inclined
into our chamber.
Room of withering mesh
read love's vocabulary
in the green lamp
of tumescent flesh.
Male genitals are small faces
forming trinities of thieves
and Christs
Fathers, sons, and ghosts.
A nose hangs over a wall
and two half eyes, sad eyes,
mute and handless, multiply
an endless round of victories.
These dry and secret triumphs, fought
in stalls and stamped in prisons,
glorify our walls
and scorch our vision.
A horror of empty spaces
propagates this seal on private places.
In the seance, the shaman led.
A sensuous panic,deliberately evoked through drugs, chants, dancing,
hurls the shaman into trance.
Changed voice, convulsive movement.
He acts like a madman. These professional hysterics, chosen precisely for their
psychotic leaning, were once esteemed.
They mediated between man and spirit-world.
Their mental travels formed the crux of the religious life of the tribe.
Dull lions prone on a watery beach.
The universe kneels at the swamp
to curiously eye its own raw
postures of decay
in the mirror of human consciousness.
Absent and peopled mirror, absorbent,
passive to whatever visits
and retains its interest.
Door of passage to the other side,
the soul frees itself in stride.
Turn mirrors to the wall
in the house of the new dead.