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DownRiver Crow

David Matlin

April 13th 808AD 38 years before the utter abandonment of the temples, the houses, the fish-filled canals and the syrupy mud that infected this world.

Open, Open Up    
Break Open            
Make an Opening

may have also been the sub-utterances calling to sexual pleasure, hallucination, blood loss in a monarch who saw himself as a "Mother" his menstrual ocean a fertility sea where Gods swim and become fetuses and galaxies, orchids heavier than lead or sun eating moths which pretend to be pillars of the most recently seen double rainbows -- "Mother" in the sexual mass of incantation and green jade.
     There were bones found. Human femurs with various hieroglyphs carved on the surfaces. The richness, the quality of the carving indicating the divinatory magic of the skills rendered there, the bone itself carrying the repositories of an unseen world, almost too dangerous to touch, the temptation to compare this matter with "plutonium" or "uranium" and to extend the carriage of such vocabulary into the treasured currencies which are rising up into ourselves, the company of vocabularies with their invocations of closure and perilous directives which hover now over us as never before. "Corrections" "Zero Tolerance" "Vapor and Trace Detection Systems" "Smart Doors" "Biometric Surveillance Portals" "Data Warehouses." All the vocabularies of a new closure which has now closed upon us with what possible irrevocations we still can't be sure.

     Dear, Dear,
          I have heard the mechanics of previous and about to be dedicated realities, the statuses of their directives.

Water
Lake
River

We suspect there was an alliance and decapitation. Butterflies massing, sucking the liquids of the recently murdered and their unclosed eyes. How to add to Rimbaud's Sale in this time. The last poem of Illuminations unlocking the Globules and Pulsations of blood and the spectrous bloodlessness spilling out of blood's sisters and brothers and mothers drowning their fixed destinations.

Sale

For sale what the Jews have not sold, what neither nobility nor crime have tasted, what is unknown to monstrous love and to the infernal probity of the masses! what neither time nor science need recognize:

The Voices restored; fraternal awakening of all choral and orchestral energies and their instantaneous application; the opportunity, the only one, for the release of our senses!

For sale Bodies without price, outside any race, any world, any sex, any lineage! Riches gushing at every step! Uncontrolled sale of diamonds!

For sale anarchy for the masses; irresponsible satisfaction for rare connoisseurs; agonizing death for the faithful and for lovers!

For sale colonizations and migrations, sports, fairylands and incomparable comforts, and the noise and the movement and the future they make!

For sale the application of calculations and the the incredible leaps of harmony. Discoveries and terms never dreamed of, -- immediate possession.

Wild and infinite flight toward invisible splendors, toward intangible delights -- and its maddening secrets for every vice -- and its terrifying gaiety for the mob.

For sale, the bodies, the voices, the enormous and unquestioned wealth, that which will never be sold. Salesmen are not at the end of their stock! It will be some time before travelers have to turn in their accounts.

     The junctions of hallucinatory stupor, rage, ecstasy. The portals of ancient ventriloquisms ripping at the borders of Life/Death where the primordial burden bearers of the living world have disintegrated. Rimbaud's heroic deviancy, visionary yearnings, the movement toward miracles of blatant shambles and delirium have the guileless composure of a beginning no matter what its life-generating horrors might bring.

Fury     Raving

"There is in every rage," Angus Fletcher said in the Prophetic Moment, "A delirium that puts the rabid mind out of touch with reality, though it may leave him with an ecstatic truth of vision."

Rabere, to RAVE, to come upon the final acuteness of warm-blooded dreaming and its virulent transmissions

Where does Rimbaud's Sale close and Ours begin?

For Sale

Mainframe based total fingertip control
without any additional personnel
or financial resources -- "now you can
scrutinize frequently"

utilization review teams, just right on line
morale on the clock and the budget feeding a captive audience
extractors to fit any space handle any classification any size
the most advanced watchtour systems urine and serum 1 test per minute systems
positive seal gasketing
thermoplastic hinges walkaway brackets and spring clips
Vigil Plane glass systems impact resistant to sledgehammers, crowbars
slammerstools Perim-Alert fence monitors easy as hanging Christmas lights point to point floor plan graphics

Bull Nose and Half Bull Nose masonry blocks
Point Blank riot vests,
Finest Quality Leather Restraints
Sprung Instant Structures
Infectious liquid spill control powders
Floating Detention Facilities
Rhino Buckets
Multiplexed signal processing displays
What will meet rifle/sub-machine gun ballistic ratings?
What will exceed federal forced entry standards for security barriers?
Multi-channeled, simultaneous recorder and playback digital voice loggers
automated head counts

All the perfections of the AMERICAN PRISON will be turned inside out on the POPULATION as HOMELAND SECURITY with the following watchterms:

SIMPLICITY
FLEXIBILITY
CAPACITY
SOLUTION
PREVENTION
DETECTION
HIGH THROUGHPUT

     Dionysos with all his savageries would have been only a component before the skills of torture, drug induced initiations, the cities waiting for the first signs of their alliances with rotten unseen planets. Venus was frozen after its first appearance as Morning Star lying near the Pleiades and Aldebaran, the Unseen accompanying it without coming into existence. The Mothering King may have declared direct descent from this planet. We cannot know of those emissaries who delivered the gifts, the public of those cities who nearly emptied their bodies of blood. Those masses and in what sequence the hallucinations came or from what "Portals" traversing the dreaded separations and the primordial effacements between the worlds of Life and the worlds of Death. The Law's reflected overpressure ratios Pr/P and Defraction Loading had imposed on music, the placement of lipstick on a male eye-lid and its assumptions of particular sexual burns delivered with those certainties, those patterns of delinquency and chastisement that make of love only a compulsive survival.

TOWN
PLACE
WORLD

     These words indicate a fragility that was overwhelming the largest American cities in the fifth through the seventh centuries AD. The valleys and their urban centers became pockets of death where noises of children vanished and the rates of vanishment became the only mathematics worth calculating. The Monster Kings had to "attract" populations, keep them, sustain them with the hair of howler monkeys and certain vampire bats which helped them to define Ages and Imaginations of Worlds and their Symbols. Through that they were able to test any available animal and plant and insect for fibre. Nothing was left unturned. The secretions of toads, snails, wasps, poisonous snakes, spiders. No materials to be discounted or censored from references of use in a past a present the worldly power leading to ineffable mordants and dyes the colors so unendurably beautiful and inventive they became the resources of cruelty and prophetic nauseas and on the whole therefore though wood construction framing of residential structures was of usually high quality craftsmanship little attention was paid to good engineering principles especially the principles of the low-yield atomic blasts in those centuries. On the whole, therefore, the construction was not well adapted to the wracking actions of plutonium generated winds.

A four-petalled flower
and its appearances
on the cheeks of a God
"White Flower Thing"
"White Flower Soul Keeper"
Old Human Young Human
who can say exactly
what the name was?

(the hieroglyphs surrounding it
are partially dissolved: have
become resistant to decipherment.
It may be an astronomical hierophany
designating what attaches to this
flower image)

Sun and Snow
Night and Stars
Sorrow and Heat
The Moon face down
Dead in the nest of a Hummingbird
And what is Hell?

Part Bee who ties the faces of the born into place?
Part Dog whose nose stews are delicious?
Part Flower that if you look into hard enough you can conjure that head-on.
The one after you hit the slots in Reno for fifty-thousand for?
Part Death. Be merciful Oh Lord. Throw fingers soaked in the wells of virgins. Hell with those pennies you reserve for wishful waters.
What prayer to be said before the about-to-be become lovely wrongs we will suffer.
The defoliations before us reeking with the defoliations to come?

the multiple notations
of SUN MOON VENUS
and their alignment
to the experiments
of raised field agriculture
the first spectacular commercialization
of crops the exact productivity of the system
the animals the birds the surrounding landscapes
pulled in and transformed by its
resemblances to Gold Rush agriculture
of the twentieth century San Joaquin Valley

the sustenance of millions in the tropical forest belt
for a least fifteen hundred years

     The women who wove the vampire bat hair may have kept in secret a marine snail which was the source of a legendary purple. How far they had to dive to abandon themselves to the defilements of drowning and the grandeurs of their impulses welding them to the venomous slime of the gastropod's undulant erotic foot? How far they had to dive?

The Emblem Glyph
of the World Attacked
with the Corpse
            as worthy inclusion
in the Depictions of Rulers

  -4.4
  the number designating
Venus    Magnitude
  belongs to the Punctured Sun
the Punctured Human Eye
  when the month of March
was eaten

     along with its days, nights
its minutes
its
  seconds

Life out of Death is the Location
of the World made of Green Obsidian

to be followed by the Axe Verb
and its mutilations

     Impinged Bone of a Split Sky with its hulking Bat barely able to fly after sucking images of nouns, the "inferior ones" in the last dawn of that day after they were thrown to a "Jaguarian" eroding the actual time surrounding it until the appearance of the Afternames and the Blue-Greens so far undated in any Calendar.
Where would they have gone? Into what jungles for the small flying mammals. The knowledge of the bats' habits? What nights and their temperatures? What blood favored? Trap which one attracted to the blood of parrots, giant monkey eating eagles?
The sloth hanging. Begin the drainage from those edentate cuticles the "Eden" of that prefix sunk backward nullified by this living termination and its inexorable possibly disease curing farts ("Bet'chew an'yer Mama a billion on it inna shitsprung second"). Electric eels? Touchlessly slurping from the top of a slimy head. The fastidiousness of the Chiroptera's tongue, catching, swallowing the pulse joined to heartbeats of electrocution, the art finally unmild, releasing any suckers and leftover chumps; lollipop stained bitches from the present tense.
     Did they prefer the ones addicted to anaconda, or, especially jaguars. The hair of those bats hosting the communal experiences of their sufferings, birth pangs, raptures, sensual awakenings, the unmapped validity of appearances they may have held in trust for thousands of years. Which women were allowed to let the bats sniff at the hoods of their clitorises, and then cut the skin there with those Eocene teeth; the parasites, epidemics, infections, the concentrations on the throbbing distended hood to be followed by dream peril and compassionate revulsions of a new knowledge interfused with novel designs and how the plucked hair of the ravishing tiny potentially infecting mammal might become part of a weave, a turn in startling color as that woman among women in their practices and specialties waited for rabies, bacterial fever, toxins of frogs smeared on the bats' lips from earlier penetration, the deadly magnificent antiquity of the pollination.

For Sale

A degraded aristocracy
always ready to sacrifice the other, to take
everything the other might desire to give, in this
case the lives of "war age" young women and men,
and then asking for more lives, and then using that sacrifice
to paraphrase James to adjust all the comforts
that sacrifice has and will offer them as the projection
of future. The accent of this assumption
in the gross tergiversations of appearances--
the Book of Wrongs rearranged
dulled
the call to Anguish a rehearsed stupefaction
deemed unworthy of a citizenry
and which the citizenry crawls after
without suspicion of the rites of squalid safety
occultly applied to the whole ground of its daily life
FOR SALE the first world giants
in whose slashed apart bodies the world was made
who started swelling with the shrinkage of the truth
until they become so irritable and smelly
even the sun can't labor fast enough.
And who would want to live around the melt ponds
of them like shit beetles. The ones rolling their filthy
quivering with worlds-to-come-balls over the hills
of a pre-earth with its still smoldering tides.
Those stink workers pushing there. Their lined up hordes
collapsing the under-pendants of uranium cliffs
that didn't know ever if they'd become
the Atomic Storms loading the brain pans of another species'
contest for desire and blood
poured by the By the Clock Rocket Girls
who really know the rules.
Pornography and time. Those Girls dripping over the clocks.
Lips of their cunts swelled with the secret powers
of their animations
to be suddenly chocked out
inside the instances of their whetting themselves
over the helpless faces of impermanence
and maybe a soaked pubic hair to drop randomly
into the aching clouds of gases that might or might not
become worlds.

Zero is human. The number with its
lower jaw pulled out while it was still
alive by the gods who are really
serious pig riders.

4 Ahua 8 Cumku

     There were Holocene inhabitants in the coastal regions of the present "San Diego": the archaeological dates 6,000 to 4,000BC. The populations would have been extremely expert with hunting, gathering, had knowledge of every wild plant and its possible properties, the women's lore emerging out of cookery, weaving , daily practicalities of storage, nutrition, cleanliness, water resources checked constantly, how to get an infant from birth to the first five years. No cities but a "civilization" just the same (and what is a "civilization"? What does it mean to be civilized at the beginning of this century?
What are the greatnesses to be watched for, breathed for? The smallest tenderest realities and their truths which must be sought as nurturing tensions and crisis that make us necessarily awkward but at the same time such rawness brings us to a daily vividness and intensity of private reach where the palette of feeling can no longer be embellished by worldly power otherwise manners crumble as does courage as well as courage's appeal to the Imagination and rather than compromise, lose the composure essential to these devotions become the Prince of Rimbaud's Tale killing all those who follow him and can't stop following him, amusing himself, cutting the throats of rare animals) always ready always prepared but something came for them; a long-term drought, a systematic failure of the local ecology we in this time cannot know. There is no evidence of violence but what the archaeological record indicates for these imaginative, skilled men and women is loss of flexibility before the disassemblages which struck them, the mind of them stopped and plunging into dangerous bewilderment and ruin. The evidence startling and in complete opposition to what we so in our modern aspirations and purchases have come to believe almost with an exhibitionist gratitude, that we can overcome the crisis ("Moreover, many said, coral reefs, alpine forests and other fragile ecosystems -- without the resiliency of human societies -- would be unable to cope with the fast changing conditions. The change in attitude, expressed in the negociations and in a formal declaration adopted Friday, has been partly driven by unusual weather this year-record floods in Europe, landslides in the Himalayas, searing drought in southern Asia and Africa. Another impetus is the rising realization that many significant shifts have been set in motion by a century-long accumulation of warming gases... in some areas, adaptation is already under way..."), the tremendous unknowns which we endlessly expect will at a sometime come to violate us and that we will with the exquisite vindications of our uniqueness....
     The record for those Holocene Peoples, the most near-recent of the far away ancestors was collapse, one they didn't want, wanted most to avoid, and became, in spite of their inventive resourcefulness, helpless.
     The verb for "astronomy" and its events: War, Decapitation, particularly selfinflicted decapitation, the names of the Gods who can with the appearances of each Creation return themselves to this fate as instruction to human creatures dependent on the mutilation, the extreme specialized violence of the suicides and their repetitions out of which come the names of Mother/Kings destined to rule destined to use their bodies and minds as the initial confrontation with death for their populations. But rather than cut the throat of the rarest animals they cut their own, used their disembodied heads as messengers to an other than human world: the portal of that flesh, its fertile rottenness an image of humanity's Word/Life at this border of visible public decay as skull racks of its deceits, the bath of lies helplessly imposed by word carrying creatures. Were they braver for it or more cowardly catching each other's gore and soaking the orchids, the water lillies that held up their palaces, their wonderful gentle unhappinesses they cultivated as droplets to rain on their People. The question to be dredged up before these miracles and feasts, the one lying dead behind the rose bushes as other little girls who have lain in their dying, for the irrevocable lovers who come to cheat them of every beginning and every end: "What are the ancient Liberties?"

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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