American Horror Story—A Poem About Spectacle & Fear

When six men can simplify six hundred tribes, 
seemingly erasing their sacred spaces, 
then covering their resilient red skin 
with clown masks, and whitewashed faces, 
it becomes quite evident that 
their lives were deemed irrelevant. 
This particular element of European settlement 
was in fact, rather malevolent. 
This bedevilment became the brick and mortar 
building blocks that laid the foundation for the extermination 
of indigeneous ancestral traces, 
eliminating their authenticity, 
and history, in order to eradicate
 them from a stolen nation. 
A genocide created by gunpowder treason, 
an extinction over time that lacked humanity, 
let alone any logic or reason. 

From 18 million brave—
belittled and enslaved to pave 
the bloodsoaked reserves that exist today, 
with less than one-third of their original clique 
laughed away an⁹d left to 
decay on some heroic highway. 
Statistics this stark should send 
shockwaves across this stolen nation, 
but instead are met with a silence 
that's as stifling as strategic strangulation. 
It's suffocating.

AND my soul cries for the lost tribes 
of a lawless station, 
invaded by a species deluded by 
their imagination of having invented emancipation.  
And yet, they still refuse to acknowledge allegations about 
sisters, and mothers, 
otherwise known as their 
missing and murdered Indigenous relations.  

As though mass graves beneath 
Catholic enclaves were some kind of coronation, 
and I'm not saying anything 
aside from stating that 
this conversation is long overdue.  

It's about time we either flipped the script, 
and fixed this broken system, 
or changed their same old 
divide and conquer, fear-monger-
ing corporately-scripted station.

Asylum.

Losing my mind was like swallowing hot coals—it stole the words from off my tongue. A treason like no other, even though we anticipate that it will burn. Embers lit up my mouth from the inside, like walls of a cavern lit entirely by torch. 

When my brain malfunctioned, my grasp on reality suddenly became loose. Unraveling like serotonin silly string until all that remained was one big knot. As my sanity escapes, all that was left is a pile on the floor of mess. 

I lose track of time as I obsess about an idea that evolves into branches that make up a nest. Twigs of delusion turn into entire trees when subjected to neglect. Dopamine twice a day does nothing to improve my self-respect.

I search the seafloor for something familiar to swim alongside with, making my way upstream until I can tell fish apart from their tailfins. Saved crocodile tears in a sandcastle—oysters reveal pearls of oxytocin alabaster.
It is finding yourself in quicksand sinking faster than a shotgun romance. A pair of rusting lock and key attached to some bridge in Prozac, France.

The metallic taste of mania often enlists the assistance of anxiety, especially when steel-spangled spices offer little in the way of variety. Pepper was better than ever back when salt was still secret, my pulse becomes a clock who only measures what's too soon to be revealed yet. Ticking thyme listens as time talks of things it wishes it had done. 

One arm's uneven the other's at odds, this unstable season's unreasonably hot. Going crazy was easier once I'd been driven there before, who said mental illness always left a suicide note scratched into stubborn cellar doors. 

On my way back to the real world, silence was the only schoolmate I knew I could trust, for even when she was pin drop quiet, her heart still sighed the heaviest. This Bipolar beauty was wickedly brilliant in battling her own serpentine uncertainty, hissing wildly as she slithered back to a sense of reptilian sobriety.