Palimpsest
2017“As many of you know, Ruby Montoya and I have engaged for the past year in various forms of what we believe to be peaceful resistance against the Dakota Access pipeline. In July, 2017, Ruby and I claimed responsibility for having undergone an 8-month-long property destruction campaign against DAPL infrastructure in an effort to halt construction.”
(Jess Reznicek)
Written on the manuscript of their bodies
in disappearing ink, their story
lingers, fades
And you won’t have heard of them
these women
because empire covers sabotage with
fresh DowJones headlines of enrichment
but
spiral down like a seed
under the head- lines, the dead-lines
the pipe-lines
read between beneath these lines
scratch the surface and you can see it
An interspecies howl
under papyrus, vellum, parchment
separate the layers to find what's preserved there
Palimpsest—
immutable underlay of truth
On election day
they torched 6 massive destruction machines
burnt em to the suffering ground
Two girls taught themselves to destroy empty pipeline valves
and Acted
their arson inspiring others to Act, boldly
Cut off the supply lines
Go deeper
Today I walk with sticks
four-legged
to ease the pain in me
and beneath this foggy body
feel the sharp animal
of another body
as real as this one
Under this pain, a well body
as underneath this mined-blasted-poisoned earth
is another
waiting in her power
for geology and consciousness to rise
and shake it all off
—Palimpsest
Their names ring through my skull
disappearing beneath darkness
like pipelines
like tales of sabotage against the machine
Jess and Ruby
deconstructive tools of alternate iterations
Like the holy lands buried beneath churches
Like witches
created by the land to defend the land
tortured, burned, and
I don’t know if they’d call themselves witches
yet
Under the Tar Sands
Under the Mississippi River
Under the pipelines, beneath prophesy
I write their names
in crystal green
in azure
in malachite
in armed words guarded by living fires
Protectors
The angle of light is changing
layers separating
The earth has turned enough to tell
turned to burn
tell it yelling
buried tales that must be told
generations of resistance
overlaid with the official story
Encrypted, it’s all there
Subjugated populations rise up
sheer as the Great Divide
Subalterns tossing up portals
like vellum, like papyrus
that’s been scraped, over-written
and buried in darkness––
Genesis is literal: let there be light!
As autumn looms over exhausted summer
surrounded by crumpled flowers
or whispers of interlocking dependencies
we learn who we are
and the moral of the story
or
this is where the tale ends
stuttering a language of longing
Drown in the paradox
strobing
love and rage, love and rage
love
and
rage
A song to guide me
into this one power
As we accelerate
into a silver skyworld
desperate as wolves
inside algorhythmic steel traps
Oh, disciplined anarchists of the underground
we chew off our feet in resistance
we unearth the impermanent pavement
to reveal our secret manifesto
We delay
disrupt industrial anguish and false necessities
the denial they escort us thru daily
We’re the unfinished animal
running from all the dazzling forecasts
Running together like thieves in the night
shaking off the might of trauma
the dust, like wild animals do
Buried underlings ready to rise up
scraping through lies with a fork and a knife
devour the shallow surface
Bared teeth
crouching under economic electronic structures
awakened to the pour of waterfall lies
to be their undoing
Servants of earth and all her calderas
carving every satellite out of the skies
with your courage
Leading the people out of the darkness
So many of us
sensing the remedy
from our barely felt tails
to where the forest grows up and over us
Beyond that insatiable desire for refinement
where we remember all of it
engathered we spark
in your name
we flame
we engulf
we knock em
alive!
back to list
Sacrifice
A Story of Power
Falling through the eye of time
puny humans shout out to gods
tossing prayers like smoke to the forces of the universe
till one eye opens in darkness.
It has it’s own plans but
we wake it, shake it, make deals with it
untill power is ours, jumps through hoops on command.
Why do they do it, these powers?
And what do they want in return?
Life inside a culture is life, just the way things are
it breathes you inside it like the air,
all that you believe is Normalized
Humans crawl tenderly through the present on thin ice.
The conqueror, history’s author
tells us that Ancient Aztecs believed in human sacrifice
Calls them Heathens—appeasing with beating hearts
Calls them Barbarians—scaring even Conquistadores
Imagines lines of divine scapegoats
Says they fell like flakes
like flashes of fishes, turning direction as one up to heaven
levering the whole culture higher towards god’s good side.
They tell us the Aztec sacrificed to terrifying gods
called one, Enemy of Both Sides
Called another, We Who Are His Slaves
If it’s true that they called them with blood and fear
I say their relationship to that was clear.
they didn’t have mass media or science
couldn’t Google how it worked
you just give ‘em living human hearts
it makes the sun come up.
The amazing invisibilty of power
just the cost of breathing here.
We walk on thinning ice, sprinkling fairy dust
—We’re all slaves to god
in our time, we don’t understand how electricity works.
0h, Technicians of the sacred—
Xcel. Exxon. G.E.
You pray way out there over vast distances
With fiber-optic coal mines, industrial waste continents
bandwidths to hell.
One eye opens in darkness.
Mountaintop removal, Fracking, Fukushima—all the pipelines, all the wires
We flip the switch and wall-to-wall power grids begin
tar sands tremble
we worship, from a distance, on screens.
If we flipped the switch,
and blood started to pour down the temple walls
If we turned on this light and life crumpled to the ground
a mountaintop exploded, somebody strangles in a crib
a womin loses all her hair
Flip the switch and
nukes contaminate 10,000 generations —
well, that’s progress.
We wouldn’t call it sacrifice.
That word’s too hot, like a beating heart
Give us keyboards, outlets, avoid at all cost, true contact with the world.
We learn to call the real world our jobs
We bend science backwards to avoid sacrificing anything
We don’t call it murder
just the way things are.
They numb us with data
swaddle us in darkness
We beg the gods for blindfolds just keep the lights on.
Our minds, colonized as banana plantations
while we feed the world to our machines.
It’s a story
it’s a prayer for power
it’s progress: what they say you can’t stop
it’s Progress, which could be called Escalation
It’s not a primitive myth, it’s Science
it’s our god
you press this button, the Power comes on
everybody loves the button
Life begins with light, every day.
Enemy of Both Sides. We Who Are His Slaves.
Flip this switch, blood starts flowing rivers
no one here is running for their lives or screaming in the streets.
Sludge fills rivers, the air and oceans toxify,
radiation is a verb.
Science doesn’t say
We are all slaves of god who created the world for humans to dominate
science just acts like it
Aztec people knew it took tremendous sacrifice to keep gods happy
what do we know?
We flip that switch. Something happens.
We don’t know what it wants
or why or how
We just join the great apocalypse,
a traffic jam on thinning ice—
Whaddaya gonna do?
Organize a resistance movement against gods?
Do you believe everything the conquerors say
or are you ready to blockade with our bodies
the blood soaked altars of those temples?
back to list
The PromisE
2009
To be responsible means to promise in return.
To whom is this promise made, and in return for what?
What is the source of your life?
As children we swallowed indigestible lies
that tied us to lifetimes of denial, paradise reduced to a world where
we produce and consume more of everything
but you can tell a child anything, and what we really are
is a seedbed for the future
feeding on the grief of the present.
To whom are you responsible?
What is the source of your life?
They told us we can live without earth and air, rivers, trees, animals,
but we need to grow up and we promised in return.
We’ll learn to listen to other voices
The choice is ours—
can we sprout this stump to a tree of revolution?
Can we jump like the pump in the heart of evolution?
We’ll sit in circles, tell the tales of our trauma
children coming home to a Mama who never left
Cos inspiration never left us here alone and
creativity’s just been wanderin’ around,
waiting for us to wake up and come on home
We are pieces of ancient earth,
bits of sacred story soaked in intellect and dirt
flowing with time’s river.
Beyond the daily data fed to us by liars lies the wind
and inside its spin swings the crysalis
in a future forest world endlessly branching
like questions I can imagine.
And under the branches, we’re seeds in the ground
crouching
ready to change the world again.
To whom are you responsible?
What is the source of your life?
This isn’t a metaphor, friends—
let’s be butterflies, re-entering, wet and tender
Let’s drop it all and pick up one thing at a time
you can’t do anything with your life that you can’t first imagine in your mind
—I’m not ready to bring down civilization,
but I’m ready to imagine it.
Let’s just walk away, or stay and smash the state
let’s liberate grace with a fuse and a match
let’s hatch out in time to fall into fields of life
and give back.
We work from the fringes, from the fertile growing edges
we’re shapeshifters turning from this lost and lonely shore
we are humans, returning, and we’re older than war.
back to list
Cornography
2012
The Mayan people believed they were made of corn.
Through the storms of history they prayed to the gift and the mystery
whispered into the open ears of maize.
Now their descendants buy Kraft instant corn that’s GMO
and Walmart sells the most tortillas in Mexico
and the seeds are all patented by Monsanto
While on this side of the border
high fructose corn syrup rules our religious order
A million acres aching under the weight of corn syrup
a sacrifice to CocaCola
Our food pyramid keeps rolling over
Like dice on a craps table betting our food security
Like crops under the combine of oil and soiled chemistry
We grow bigger with agribusiness
forcing trade agreements that are slave agreements
U.S. corn fired through the weapon of NAFTA
the final solution of those corporate bastards, our masters
in a world full of farmers smashed flat by the power of one
Conquest is done without guns these days
as corn conquers the earth in an industrial haze
In the whorehouse of Free Trade, the first task
is prostituting all that surplus biomass
It’s not just soda pop, check out the meat
USDA’s plan is to shove as much corn as they can
through the guts of the animals that we eat
Shape-shifting them to production units like they never had a heart
served up to us boneless and bloodless as a pop-tart
More fossil fuel machines
but these are able to suffer
Feeding corn to cows, chickens, even salmon
‘cos farm policies champion this crop and no other
They subsidize high fructose corn syrup, but not carrots
so the cheapest calories in the supermarket are also the unhealthiest
Barcoded, irradiated, genetically amalgamated—
CORN—the biotic army of one, replacing all others
Mothers blinded by the plastic shine
infinite horizons of monoculture
A global tide of homogenization
now they’ve liberated food from nature
This corn was re-born of the machine
weaning us off real nutrition to a new cuisine
we’re eating more of a single plant than Life ever dreamed of
The food chain’s tentacles are transcendentical
longer and longer and less comprehensible
many different shapes, but the food’s all identical
Perishable, like instincts traded for antibiotics
We’re sipping petroleum in a culture made neurotic
but it’s time to get real
‘Cos we’re like cows in a feedlot laying in their own shit
and that shit served back to them, bit by bit
We’re like veal
We’re like chickens or pigs squealing for mercy from the cages to the slaughter line
the last page of their miserable corn-stuffed life
You are what you eat.
We stand in lines, conquered by monotony.
We eat what they toss in the trough
numb to the cacophony
My people stumble along
pretending not to hear the pop!pop!pop! of the stun-gun’s song
And it comes down like a hammer
right between the eyes
and we drown, and we act surprised
like disease is a failure of medicine
and not the heart of this heartless system
that grades us all according to cuts
and how well we fit as production units
Spraying poisons and patents
monopolies and cancer
corn is laundering money for Cargill and Con Agra
But wherever you live, the sun falls for free
and life turns itself into food for you, willingly
It’s all a garden we’ve been taught not to see
If we could tear down the walls
and watch our foodsheds disappearing
If we could tear ourselves away
from the bright lights and jingles that we’re hearing
If we could starve the corporations in this fast food nation
that have conquered the landscape and drained all imagination
to trade the logic of nature for the logic of industry —
We’re gonna see how it turns out that convenience is the enemy
We’ve forgotten how to pray to food anymore
but my body is a temple
to the pyramid of corn.
back to list