THE SPIRIT EATERS

For John Trudell

You warned us about them

--the ones who dwell behind

Masks of democracy

The No Faces

Who consume spirituality

They broke their promises

Leaving their words hollow

And soulless

Even in death we were desecrated

Dug up and put in museums

To satisfy their notion

That we were already extinct

They took everything from you

From family to security

Your truths discredited

But spirituality cannot

Be edited

It cannot be harnessed

By the celluloid Indians

It cannot be tarnished

By those who practice

Fake medicine.

It is beyond a name given

Or stolen

For the spirit eaters

Have taken everything

From the land to the air

-and no matter how much was taken

They still want what isn’t theirs

The ideology of manifest destiny

Has devoured its own Nicomachian tail

And is choking on it’s own greedy offspring

You saw the banality

You saw the finality

And as easy as it is to be consumed

By America’s excessive appetite

You remind us to protect our spirits

You remind us to continue

To reignite the fires that burn

Amongst the oceti sakowin

My comrade, I will not let

The spirit eaters devour me

to the girl who painted roaches

I never forgot the time you told me

that as a kid you used to paint roaches

with fingernail polish

in a poverty-stricken rez home 

I imagine you alone, wild-haired and dirty

in a house full of drunk adults

it reminded me of my own neglect

it reminds me of what I went without

but how unusual it was for you

to see beyond all of that dirty

and paint a roach so pretty

I imagine your walls 

crawling with little slivers of blues, reds, and greens

scuttering metallic things dashing in and out of everything

catching the moonlight thru a dirty screen

I wish I had known to paint the ugly things 

instead of trying to stomp out and hide 

the poor dullness inside

from the bedbug bites to the head full of lice

I wish I had grown up in a middle-class life

but it wasn't so 

it just wasn't meant to be 

maybe I should paint some roaches

and let them scatter (thru the cracks of my mind)

brings some color to the gray matter

and maybe then I'll be fine 

Purple hands

In an old boarding school picture

I saw those native boys

With purple hands

The anguish in their eyes

full of pain

From the nuns who bound                                                                                                                            

 their hands with ties

simply for being left-handed

And I felt my own left hand cramping up

-from the shame

--from the pain of being told

I couldn’t write with it.

Those white teachers in grade school

 told me it was wrong

and so they forced me

to write using my right hand.

And was it right?

To be taught this way?

An education pockmarked

with superstition

And in their beliefs

--I felt I was marked

by the beast of my kind

By their notions of me being wild

 backwoods, unrefined

I used to dig my nails into my left palm

So much that it hurt--that it bled

A stigmata self-made

A byproduct of shame

of being told I am one of Cain’s children

And I am marked

by the color of my skin

Doomed to be a stolen orphan

Buried in an unmarked grave

Just like those poor children

with purple hands

Crying through the photograph

I feel it still        echoing

in my mind, my memories

--of past trauma handed down to me

generation to generation

I am those children

Stuck in a system of nuns, of priests, of schools

That have tied me into their notion

That I can be taught to be just like them

That I can live a life without sin

And I cry and I want to unbind

Left hand, right hand

Wrong way, right way

And with this all of this

hatred and frustration

I forgot I had my own heartlines, lifelines, bloodlines

I cut off my own circulation

Chimera

I grew up mislabeled
Not a transexual
But traumatized like one
evil like a pentagram
i did not fit in
between the lions
and the lambs

if i am pagan
then i am a christian
either way
i am hated
by most religions
what's in my name?
In the dna?
That turned so many against me?

a sin to taint the family tree
truth can be a split-hooved thing

and so i did not honor
thy father and mother
i did not fit in
with all my wed-locked brothers

in the lion's den
the weakest one
does not survive the pride
my own father denounced me
long before he died

those venomous truths
still hiss at my heels
Those scaley thoughts
Make me unpeel
my name, my heritage
Born a bastard
I did not look like
All of the rest

And tho i am not satanic
I am deemed evil thru the aesthetic
From dog tooth and long nails
The christian ideology that kills the savage
Still prevails
--thru how my religious-raped family
Looks at me

And with the cutting of my mane
Went the dying innocent clasp
Of femininity
Neither him, nor her
Neither she, nor me

Death to Hydra

it is eel-like

the reach of corporations

who worm their way thru

loophole after loophole

to take imminent domain

over the landscape

for the sake of some coal

or even black gold

and often we are told

It will be good for the nation

but this is a nation

of encroaching corporations

who have sky-scraped

through Mount Olympus

to control the laws that

govern us

and corrupt the ones who swore

to protect us

this land is no mans land

when it can seized by a court order

stolen by bureaucracy

by proxy of a bank

It was only a matter of time 

before a new hydra was born

out of the entrails of a dead plutocracy

whose oily tentacles

have now reached across our waters

across our reservations

selling a pipe dream

To an awakening nation

It is time to fight oil for water

It is time to fight oil with blood

for we have countless ancestors

fighting through us

fighting with us

let their voices slay

the many heads

of the black snake

let our words be the scythe

let our prayers be the fire

that cauterizes the wounds

of this greedy beast of an empire

Colossus

It was soul heavy
generation crushing
these symbols
of false freedoms
that hang over us
as we stood in the Aryan shadow
of a new colossus

all the roads
lead to the same concrete idealogy
that the old gods
Always have to make way
For the new ones

And we--
the White Clay People
look up to the libertas
The mount rushmore
The barrier put in place
To divide and conquer
To make way for
For the systematic slaughter

their statues
marble-white
eyes soulless and blank
how befitting
they made it in their god's image
and we carved into the stone
inevitable perishable hieroglyphs
that the sun would bleach out
that the rain would wash away
because we knew we'd all go back
into that shaken etch-a-sketch
that we call earth

we had no coliseums
no great pyramids
just the sinking mounds
that the giants left us
but does that imply our existence
is less meaningful?
put it on a pedestal

we don't care to be carbon-dated
manipulated
Into theories that deny our place
here in the united states
invisible
With liberty and justice
For some

Old stones are crushed
Bones turned to cement
And plaster
But we did not mean
To be martyrs
Our own places of worship
Decimated to make way
For modern day culture

Because America was built in a day
so that only the whites can say
This is our land
And isn't it colossal
The joke made of my people
that we were somehow
Less worthy to hold dominion
Over these lands.

Ozymandias
Let the decay come
And free us

pow! wow!

I am the wow
in your pow!
I am intertribal
Yet I am always
dancing by myself

I am traditional
I am capable
--to adapt
and what of these labels
what of the blood degree
I am royal
yet I am able
to be inept

what is sacred
what is sacrilege
I am always thorough
but I am not purebred

I will have a vision
---when I want to
no one can govern
creativity
and so what if
i fail
does that reflect
upon
my native synchronicity

I speak naively
I speak so bravely
I speak whenever
The fuck I can

I have no medicine
I have no man
I am just a minority
Trying to fit in with the masses
Whenever I can

so just don't ask me
just don't bother me
don't seek any answers
to some kind of new age
divinity

I'm just a person
Trying to be wooed
Trying to be wowed
In a biased
Ethnocentric crowd