The Lords ( James Douglas Morrison )


Look where we worship.

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 prosti-
tution. But in the grimy ring immediately surround-
ing 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, pawn shops,
burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which
never die, in streets and streets of all-night
cinemas.


When play dies it becomes the Game.
When sex dies it becomes Climax.


All games contain the idea of death.


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.


It take large murder to turn rocks in the shade
and expose strange worms beneath. The lives of
our discontented madmen are revealed.

Camera, as all-seeing god, satisfies our longing
for omnisciece. To spy on others from this
height and angle: pedestrians pass in and out of
our lens like rare aquatic insects.

Yoga powers. To make oneself invisible or small
To become gigantic and reach to the farthest things.
To change the course of nature. To place oneself
anywhere in space or time. To summon the dead.
To exalt senses and perceive inaccessible images,
of events on other worlds, in one's deepest inner
mind, or in the minds of others.

The sniper's rifle is an extension of his eye. He
kills with injurious vision.

The assassin (?), in flight, gravitated with
unconscious, instinctual insect ease, moth-
like, toward a zone of safety, haven from the
swarming streets. Quickly, he was devoured
in the warm, dark, silent maw of the physical
theater.

Modern circles of Hell: Oswald (?) kills President.
Oswald enters taxi. Oswald stops at rooming house.
Oswald leaves taxi. Oswald kills Officer Tippitt.
Oswald sheds jacket. Oswald is captured.

He escaped into a movie house.

In the womb we are blind cave fish.

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.

Sleep is an under-ocean dipped into each night.
At morning, awake dripping, gasping, eyes
stinging.

The eye looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brilliance.

Nothing. The air outside
burns my eyes.
I'll pull them out
and get rid of the burning.

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.

"Players" - the child, the actor, and the gambler.
The idea of chance is absent from the world of the
child and primitive. The gambler also feels in
service of an alien power. Chance is a survival
of religion in the modern city, as is theater,
more often cinema, the religion of possession.

What sacrifice, at what price can the city be born?

There are no longer "dancers", the possessed.
The cleavage of men into actor and spectators
is the central fact of our time. We are obsessed
with heroes who live for us and whom we punish.
If all the radios and televisions were deprived
of their sources of power, all books and paintings
burned tomorrow, all shows and cinemas closed,
all the arts of vicarious existence...

We are content with the "given" in sensation's
quest. We have been metamorphosised from a mad
body dancing on hillsides to a pair of eyes
staring in the dark.

Not one of the prisoners regained sexual balance.
Depressions, impotency, sleeplessness... erotic
dispersion in languages, reading, games, music,
and gymnastics.

The prisoners built their own theater which
testified to an incredible surfeit of leisure.
A young sailor, forced into female roles, soon
became the "town" darling, for by this time they
called themselves a town, and elected a mayor,
police, aldermen.

In old Russia, the Czar, each year, granted-
out of the shrewdness of his own soul or one of
his advisors' - a week's freedom for one convict
in each of his prisons. The choice was left to the
prisoners themselves and it was determined in
several ways. Sometimes by vote, sometimes by lot,
often by force. It was apparent that the chosen
must be a man of magic, virility, experience,
perhaps narrative skill, a man of possibility, in
short, a hero. Impossible situation at the
moment of freedom, impossible selection,
defining our world in its percussions.

A room moves over a landscape, uprooting the mind,
astonishing vision. A gray film melts off the
eyes, and runs down the cheeks. Farewell.

Modern life is a journey by car. The Passengers
change terribly in their reeking seats, or roam
from car to car, subject to unceasing transformation.
Inevitable progress is made toward the beginning
(there is no difference in terminals), as we
slice through cities, whose ripped backsides present
a moving picture of windows, signs, streets,
buildings. Sometimes other vessels, closed
worlds, vacuums, travel along beside to move
ahead or fall utterly behind.

Destroy roofs, walls, see in all the rooms at once.