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 middle­weight contender. Near him the trusted journalist, confident. 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.

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 eyes looks vulgar
Inside its ugly shell.
Come out in the open
In all of your Brillance.

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.

Please
show us your ragged head
& silted smiling eyes
calm in fire
a silky flowered shirt
edging the eyes, alive
spidery, distant
dial lies

come, calm one
into the life­try

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.

Thoughts in time and out of season
The Hitchhiker
Stood by the side of the road
And leveled his thumb
In the calm calculus of reason.

"Me and my...ah...mother and father...and a grandmother and a grandfather...were driving through the desert, at dawn, and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just maybe...I don't know what happened...but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death. So the car pulls up and stops. That was my first reaction to death. I must have been about four... Man, all of a sudden there were red skins and they're just lying all over the front of the road bleeding.
So they pull the car up and they stop. And I'm just a kid so I just stay in the car with the women. I don't know whether I'm crazy or what but I had the feeling when that happened, like I didn't want to look back, like a child, like a flower whose head is just floating in the breeze man.
But the reaction I get now thinking back... is that, possibly, the soul of one of these Indians, maybe several of them, just ran over and just jumped into my fucking brain.
I'm sitting there and I know somethings happening because I can dig the vibrations of the people around me, who I think are very heavy people because they're my parents and grandparents and everythings real secure, y'know.
And all of a sudden I just realised that...ah...they were just little, screaming creeps in the face of reality. And that they didn't know what was happening anymore than I did.
That was the first time I tasted fear.

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.

The voyeur, the peeper, the Peeping Tom, is a dark comedian. He is repulsive in his dark anonymity, in his secret invasion. He is pitifully alone. But, strangely, he is able through this same silence and concealment to make unknowing partner of anyone within his eye's range. This is his threat and power.

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.

Principals of seance: to cure illness. A mood might overtake a people burdened by historical events or dying in a bad landscape. They seek deliverance from doom, death, dread. Seek possession, the visit of gods and powers, a rewinning of the life source from demon possessors. the cure is culled from ecstasy. Cure illness or prevent its visit, revive the sick, and regain stolen, soul.

Urge to come to terms with the "Outside," by absorbing, interiorizing it. I won't come out, you must come in to me. Into my womb–garden where I peer out. Where I can construct a universe within the skull, to rival the real.

She said, "Your eyes are always black." The pupil opens to seize the object of vision.

Through his efforts, the shaman helps his patients transcend their normal ordinary definition of reality, including their definition of themselves.
The shaman shows those in his audience they are not emotionally and spiritually alone in their struggle against illness and death.
The shaman shares his special powers and convinces these people, on a deep level of his consciousness, that another human is willing to offer up his own self to help them.

You parade thru the soft summer
We watch your eager rifle decay
Your wilderness
Your teeming emptiness
Pale forest on verge of light
decline.

More of your miracles
More of your magic arms

Hi. How you doin'? I just got back into town. L.A.
I was out on the desert for awhile.
Yeah. In the middle of it.
Right...
Hey, listen, man, I really got a problem.
When I was out on the desert, ya know,
I don't know how to tell you,
but, ah, I killed somebody.
No...
It's no big deal, ya know,
I don't think anybody will find out about it, but...
just, ah...
this guy gave me a ride, and ah...
started giving me a lot of trouble,
and I just couldn't take it, ya know?
And I wasted him.

Look where we worship.
We all live in the city.
The city forms– often physical, but inevitably psychically–a circle. A Game. A ring of death with sex at it's center. Drive towards 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, pawn shops, burlesques and brothels, in dying arcades which never die, in streets and streets of all­night cinemas.

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