PRISON INK. DAY 2222. (PRISON-PILLOW-FIGHT-CLUB.)

This day is dedicated to the Lakota Women: Witchy Wanda Black Elk and Mary Crow Dog. Your scripted courage helped get me through the rage of dark prison days, when I shared our Wakan Tanka/Akua, the Lakota/Hawaiian force behind our God, in the worst possible ways.

BEHOLD: A chapter from the pillow-fight-club: The Saga of Lakota Hard Pillows and Hawaiian Cemetery Stone. 

It would have been way cooler if this happened 11 days sooner! An overlooked numerical synchronicity of missed numerology numbered in the potential of a quantum superposition. 

So…what most would call B.S., looks to the brave physicist, the hanged man of the Tarot, and the innocent man in chains, as prescient remains of our “Fifth Business.” A “deux ex machina” moment of bless, where God is found in the gears, and in the rounds and years of prison-pillow-fight-club. A moment to pause and honor God with applause. 

God is always seen clearly in bad play-writing. A free spin away from the prophecy of good writing spun on its head in vertigo and musical special effects. An operator connecting life and calling collect to the dead as the secrets lie upside down in human shadow, obscured in dread and violent sorrow. Add music to the libretto of a beloved resurrected and scored in an operatic ghetto. Cue the dissonant musical effects, as Lila Ċepa conducts/directs with a broken baton and possible broken bone. Anything to get the perfect shot of vulnerability in a prison cell made home. (Enjoy this director’s cut.) 

P.A.! (PRODUCTION/PRISON ASSISTANT!) hand me the megaphone! 

BACKGROUND UP!

AND…ACTION!

INT.  PRISON CELL.  DEAD ZONE.

Hard pillows soften cemetery stone. 

Flowers are to a grave, as pillows to a bed. We place them at our head and hearts in a ritual that starts to honor and respect our short and long kept sleeps. A reverential repeat that keeps human gratitude in action and in the mind’s attitude for those dreamy times when the poison in the mind distills to steam rising to intoxicate the collective dream. A phase-state of understanding and higher consciousness blessed in a shamanic scene. Here is one in real time with a “sticks and stones” choreo’d dance theme. My shiny-new “dream” of a Cellie is all compressed steam searching desperately for an outlet, in this wasteland of Cellie Russian Roulette, playing Faust for bullets in the land of the dreamless. 

In the land of the moonless. 

In the land of the soulless. 

A grieving, inconsolable mess who just lost his mom. 

Cue: any Dirge for a song. 

Add the Bass-Vibrato of a Bom! Bom! Bom! Stolen from Bizet’s “Carmen.” 

Tristeza virus in an orange orchard affecting orange is the new black, like policies of scorched earth, as my former Series 3 hack, Commodities Broker/Defense Intel-Self sighs and buys Orange Juice Futures soon to be flying off the shelf, like in Aaron Russo’s “Trading Places with Fascism,” exactly like my prison frame, expertly crafted by Blue Faces I would love to name. The “why” behind my time in the beast’s belly, so far south in penguin confetti, it tastes of Shawshank excrement in the umami receptors of the mouth. (ready the CUE: “We are the screenwriters of our own suffering.” What? For those readers who were wondering the existential “Why” behind the why.) Back to the fates of my current Director’s Atropos-Cut of the Day, and the convict with the "finding God" cliche. 

My Cellie is a garden variety hulk. Take out the green stalk and add prison red ink. A tough walk, sharp as Tayi Tibble talk, but decays in the poetic think. He lives in sunless fields of blight, where flowers of insight yield to hate that grate my inner shamanic chalk board with nails manicured in the morgue of prison stink. Pails full of Jack the Ripper shredding Rothko’s Houston chapel into black confetti with a doctor’s scalpel always at the ready. Then add Dexter-apple-red-tales with faux Baby Ruth’s floating in caddy shack pools of shit-truths in pre-splattered Prison Ink. The ink is over the walls and under the skin. Ready, aim…I think under wire, my Cellie is the extrovert type-A client, so much hung jury time, he added an esquire. Despite his clan, he’s defiant, so more Han Solo-Man than choir, in the opera of our “Fifth Business Empire” of violent felons that fell into this hell of a musical. 

Cue the paper Death Star moon. A soliloquy to swoon, to fly a paper plane on the real spaceship-moon. 

He possesses a very giving personality (to the point of magnanimity) in this theater of strawberry. He is in a fruity club called “211.” 

I was in heaven for a split second in error, when I asked him if he, too, loved the poetry of the fairer…Sylvia Plath. She passed on 2/11, and I thought it was a tribute to when she bought the farm, from his cute little “club” to her and her sad suicide on that 11th day in February. Sylvia’s amusing ride into her last play. A vintage of her own Hamlet’s wine: “to be or not to be,” as she wore an oven for a hat and depression as a last sign. Cue Oliver Sacks: His wife mistook him for a hat? 

No, Cue Rene Magritte and his fedora cap. In prison the butt side shows, too. Face breathing in pillow particles like Plath ovens, in scenes of apple-bottom reds and blues, covered in the bad jizz/jazz of identifiable patterns. 

Cover the Plath butt with a Magritte hat for a turn to artistic prestige. Better than that, like real magic, CUE: the aftermath of this crappy musical. Dancing on bruised orange knees. 

As I thought in the abstract, my Cellie gave me that same odd look I had seen once before, when I let slip the kooky, Area-51 lore of Russia’s “Kasputin Yar” yore, housing live gray aliens, the source of measles, as per my biological weapons instructor, “Vratch/Dr.” Artie Pasechnik. An accidental slip of the Top Secret tongue-in-cheek show, to my less in the “Need To Know” chemical weapons instructor, Dr. Moreau, under the REAL King’s shadow. An invincible summer in Frankfurt, Germany, as Doc Moreau and I were sitting at the same chow hall table that fabled Elvis, “American Coffee Shop Cool King,” used to have his morning pelvis. I err, but mean…coffee and sing, while the King was stationed in Germany during his royal tour of duty. A perk of learning weaponized chemistry. The Yuwipi in me seance’d Elvis to be or not to be, every lunch hour while taking this Top Secret course. Back to the Future…

As I registered the bio-chemical source that my alien look inspired in the befuddled look my Cellie made, this “211” piece of very large shade, “hulk-splained” his violent gang numerology. My soul was maimed. My karmic number long overdue in a world of violence, I too, helped create, with a more violent and bigger government-backed enemy of all other state. I wanted to love the bull and hate the bully. My version of Gandhi’s: “Hate the sin, love the sinner.” A fulfilling satyagrahi philosophy, but beware…this son had a lot of pain to share. And, mind you, as previously mentioned, he was the sharing kind. Spend a night with rage in a cage with me. Behind the rage is usually fear and sadness. I have no fear. Sadness, Rumi. So much sadness here, is but a prison “wall between two gardens!” Thank you Rumi and Sufi friends that twirled, for showing me the wall blocking my blue world, spinning my Hanukkah color in vertigo, that hurled vomit like upchuck Bukowski, closing my eyes to the smelly libretto and poetry, praying for pizza pies, so Parmesan could be a remote possibility. The wall without eyes, the wall that was real, shape shifted into a Spanish Arena feel. A scene steal in the musical. The 211 bull huffing puffle, head down waiting to kerfuffle in this meet-cute. My role as a matador in the all red “killer” jumpsuit. The arena smells more of hate than bull-shitter fume, like an Iago-strawberry-handkerchief well placed, in Othello’s dark gloom, the size and whiff of a 7-11 bathroom, which enlarges the lovely vision of the present, when the bull charges. 

A gift? 

Surprised? 

Only if not centered in the moment in the featured attraction, but baptized in distraction. “Lift the human veil!” Black Elk, on his high mountaintop of old age, would detail. Here, is the best view. Centered, is the best time spent. 

So I had to turn this bull into a steer at that moment. Steer into the skid, without de-nutting this kid, here, in my budding rose garden, or incur the wrath of his quite substantial book club, never reading Sylvia Plath, whose only book is “Fight Club,” with walls closing in, from side to side, like the trash compactor ride on the Death Star. 

Cue: narrow minds in tunnel focus, far, far, far away, in a galaxy, far past what the Eighth amendment should allow. 

Dark cloudy swastikas form above my Cellie’s brow. 

Their fight club meetings are a testament to the power of blood oaths; sticky and silent. I pause thinking of John Lennon’s throat shot. Like MLK. Like JFK. Like RFK. Like my Top Secret “Puzzle Palace” school, showing me patterns in the throats. A shot-calling card of real ballers behind my NDA oaths, that paid for the bullets to keep all shadow hidden and offers a P.I.E. (Propaganda. Intimidation. Elimination.) to all shot callers revealing what is under the crust. A light the shadows must extinguish like the sound of a whistle blow, with tinny pans or the silence found in an empty kitchen’s nuclear glow. This hidden world of P.I.E. I know well. Former Green Beret. Former asset in DEFENSE INTEL. So, how does one fell and castrate a bull, while leaving the balls intact? To not fool with the bull’s adorable, but violent and political, prison PAC? Shall I cast the “The Coffee Shop Cool People?” 

Fact…I went with the prison-pillow-fight-club-people. 

Shall we shape shift in the striped shadows, from shitty verse, eventually, to ever so serious prose? 

Forgive me, for it will be, much, much worse, as the smell sticks to my greased fingers and nose, like the Highway of Death lingered on Kuwait to Iraqi roads for this former Green Beret and his successful play turned unsuccessful play, as a member (off-Broadway) of the fatal “22 Vets every Fucking day.” It was easy to see where my Cellie’s denial of hurt was heading. (Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt.) Before his white wedding to the “I Do’s” of his violent fate, he would have to do battle with his playdate of anger, bargaining, and depression games with me locked down in a cell that body shames, not the gymnast, but the gymnast’s 10cm balance beam. 

So, I asked him to choose the dance theme, to get to acceptance and the Kubler-Ross END SCENE: 

On The Silver Screen: A Catchphrase. Waiting! Hi! Old friend of new Hollywood, Dean Shull, ringing in my skull. 

Imagine the following catchphrase said by Clint Eastwood: Would you prefer the “easy” way or the “hard” way? 

The easy way was me choking him out and then inserting stuff up the butt that doesn’t come out, while unconscious. This particular scene requires a medical assist. This M.O. ends in the hole and a solo dance for a chance at deeper contemplation. A promo of the 5 Kubler-Ross steps that deals with the “grief occupation.” Each step feels of blitzkrieg and Nazi invasion. The effects are well defined specs: I get a new 211-Cellie bullet within the chambers of the Boris-spin, of Russian Cellhouse Roulette. Place your bet! (Extra! Extra! This Just In! “Boris and his Cellie Gambit” is my favorite writ of wit on this CONS hit-amusement ride.) 

Then, damn it, like circus sideshow Bob, my Half/Iyeska-Heyoka side said in a clownish timbre, behind a thought that lingers…

“Pict-ion!” (A mix of picture and envision in Heyoka-speak.) A clown looking down into a microscope tweaking the focus with a TV remote, in a vain hope to find the planet Uranus in a pail of confetti, as a light bulb explodes in thought bubbles raining ridiculous pillows of cloud font in shadows of psychic-strawberry-rubble. A seer, peeking through the rubble of imminent trouble, sans fear. I said fuck it, Cellie, we’re doing this the “pillow-fight-club” hard way, in NOW time. 

Let’s press play. 

As a witchy brew began to bubble in my mind. An elixir that cured all trouble. A toast to the memory of most every childhood problem solved. BEWARE. There is Lakota wisdom of Witchy Wanda involved. 

My 100% Lakota Grandmother used to say…”If you learn one thing from me, today, Lila Ċepa Winyan Sapa…” My Granny always said my Lakota name with a suppressed giggle that looked a little like a 2X4 dehydrated into wood jerky, animated into sepia’d scenes within Disney’s Magic Forest cartoon’d to quirky spite. A wood drawn way too hard for termite. 

A tree fall I heard, only recently, within my third-eye shadow. A call I did not hear until the vision was smudged with Heyoka clown paint and clear of liquor that taints the third eye, as the Yuwipi “saint” of a woman summoned me. 

Her magic was lost on me in my youth’s wilderness, until my NDE, (Near Death Experience) that lasted an eternity of 112 seconds. God Bless. Then, subsequently, the karma of my incarcerated sobriety. After my innocence was under arrest. 

So, I was gonna bring this bad boy named “White Nigger,” (that’s the prison nickname this young trigger and suicidal fight man gave to himself in this con’s colorful land. I couldn’t make this ridiculous shit up. I could, but imagination is unnecessary when locked up and more important than knowledge, says my inner Einstein, peering over a ledge upside down, seeing star. 

I did find there were no black people in his “Car.” (Car means prison gang.) I was sure it was just a coincidence, but it rang in my memory and brought me back to my work infiltrating 20th Special Forces Group, I-Spying the troop of Barry Seal replacements of the CIA-Rogue-Pegasus group, realizing there were no “brothers” in the Brooksville, Special Forces unit as well. I hope that’s changed in the last 30 years. My Delta friends had one black man in their entire Wally World unit. Those that “Deal in Lead, Friend.” called him Token. 

A jump back to the future, hoping my parachute opens. 

I took “White Nigger” by the hand like we were best friends. It was like trying to palm a Volkswagen bug with the pseudo-science of palmistry on drug, or palming a handle on reality that could only be found on broken teapots stamped “Mein Kampf” in fragmented bold fonts. 

“Size only matters, when you are not well trained.” My Sifu, the famed Dr. Kam Yuen, 35th degree Black Belt from the Shaolin Temple would always explain to this Yuwipi padouan, along with: “Escape the mental to find the dreamscape where nothing is coincidental.” In sync, I aligned my stars to shine and think with the best Jedi before these bars made me a star in my own star wars musical. (Has Casting called in this 211 actor to end the show or add a wow factor?) The Lakota maxim known by the One: When the clown/student is ready, the Heyoka/teacher will come. Every student-clown surely knows they treat their teacher poorly if the Heyoka-in-training goes…forever remaining a student. Mastery is meant to be developed. Life is not a test to fail or pass. We are enveloped by experience for our own master class, to share with the universe, a uniquely original verse. Class back in session. Time for the confession. Here goes some pre-violent prose, God knows, is unworthy of verse:

I led this white hulk by the hand and put him on the bottom bunk and I sat on a round circle of a metal chair bolted to a metal desk, bolted to the concrete wall behind me. I faced him sitting eye to eye, two feet away from each other, amidst all this metal, concrete and striped sunlight filtering evil as “unfit for human consumption.” Prison inked far from the masses, blotting out my stars, like squid ink in a dry ocean.

Two star-warriors, one young and one old ready to share their mettle. A youth trying to share his honed battle abilities with the sword in grieving rage, and the other, trying to break the sword, upend the checkered board in a touchy-feely show of hands that can go muted rape-whistle in a single blow. 

Tell me young starlet, Olivia Rodrigo, is this what you mean when you sing from a “vulnerable” place?

So, we sat for a moment in that “vulnerable” space. 

I replaced the serenity of our silence with the following Heyoka summons: “Before our Fourth of July firework pops off and gives us the bends, like nuclear yoga under a low canopy of concrete sky, below deep, blood soaked oceans…you must meet the Witchy Grandmother that raised me. Why? 

Because my mom happened to die…when I was two.”

“White Nigger” without a clue, said: “Bet,” and leaned back on the bed for story time. His bald, fully-tattooed skull of a skull, was a mind of paradox. A needed redundancy that fell plumb on the concrete wall behind him and right in front of me. He closed his eyes and said, “Shoot.”

There would be no sucker punches, or “honorable” to loot. If that happens, his entire book club would know, and throw their books at me, or set me in a book-burning font. A haunt in fire text, like Trailer Swift. R.I.P. as she went prison stiff and ashy.

And I work in the prison library! 

That is not a play of civil disobedience I’d like to display in this musical. And, suckers are dishonorable, like all punches. 

I am Andy Dufresne. My stage is Shawshank pain and constant blood lunches. It’s time for a new song. It’s time for a new dance. 

So, I got one of my Granny arrows out of my spiritual quiver and looked past the unbroken horizon for a target I couldn’t see, that my Granny-view would have to deliver. So, I closed my eyes and let go:

When I was 11, I was adopted by my Grandmother (Wanda Black Elk) in South Dakota after she found out that I was placed in foster homes for over a year by my stepmother, Mary Jane Silva, on the islands of Oahu and Kauai.

There was Hawaiian inheritance silver lost to collection plates. 30 pieces in biblical exchange rates. 

My Granny had supernatural intuition, but only for a drunken, three-minute window, right before she passed out and usually peed on herself and made a Lebowski rug out of the nylon straps on the patio-chair-turned-dining-room-chair with an imposter complex. When I was 15, I saw the same imposter complex in the mirror. 

Witchy Wanda noticed.

I realized I had not a single memory of my Mother and it hurt. A hurt that permeated every cell and breached that point where the organic decays in the spiritual, because of misunderstanding or mishandling. Or neglect. 

And, I was a white-faced “Wasi’chu” on the Pine Ridge Indian Rez. An authentic “White Ni**er.” 

And before that a “Fuckin’ Haole!” in Hawaii. Another form of authentic “White Ni**er.” 

Languages of hate scripted in the umami text and texture of my two mother tongues. 

Before I joined military intelligence and special forces, and then was black bagged by an Inouye-burn, there was a point in my life where I left a path of destruction at every fork in the road I chose. "3-2-1 dimensional. A fish attempting to climb a tree, finding frequency and magnets locking the soul in this hologram of a reality, free of flight. Spinning vertigo to violence in Samsara’s wheel, broken spokes grounding the chariots of the Gods!" My Granny would drunko-analyze.

Early one dreary morning, my Granny, after a daily “all-nighter” wrestling with white man’s spirits, was a dirty puddle reflecting in the kitchen's slight halo of light phlegmed in poverty. Her fight was always with the Canadian white man’s spirits. Seagrams 7 Canadian Whisky was always her poison. Her half hooded eyes caught me going to the outhouse. She screamed Iyeska! (Half-Breed!) As her eyes flicked to high beams. Her word was as solid as a stare from the gorgon, Medusa. It hit me like a wall. I froze, whiplashed in the wilds in front of her painted-the-town-red-eyes. She wilted and slurred a nutter-butter-inaudible into the glass of the patio table, “temporarily” acting as our kitchen table for the last few years. Rez poverty was so heavy it came with smells. Touch a hot plate in the hot sun and do not lift your finger when you feel the burn, but only after you smell it. That smell was the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where I summered in my youth of scorched earth. 

My drunk Granny slumped over in her patio chair with nylon straps that smell like asparagus pee. This field of asparagus has been the only kitchen chair for a year. She shoots up from the stench like rocket science when she sees me and visually brightens, like a UFO tractor beam operator accidentally hit the “Materialize” instead of the “Dematerialize” button, and adds an otherworldly dimension to her Shamaness’d glow. She flicks an inner switch and shape shifts her face from puddle-mud-drunk to the sobriety of a placid mountain lake. My drunken Indian Granny turns to the prestige of a magical “Yuwipi” holy woman and speaks like abracadabra, as she seances her illusion with “Promising Young Woman” sobriety, that would always chill me like “Newspeak,” in the Orwellian year of my teen 1984:

“Lila Ċepa!”(Suppressed UPS-brown delivery of a chuckle, breaks only for a split second, her wooden form as she stood amongst her kitchen-patio-kitsch.) 

“Hear this ancient Lakota Yuwipi wisdom: Never bury your mother in the ground! If you do, her skeleton weighs your back like 206 bony atmospheres. Thorns in your inner rose garden will ring like sharp tinnitus in your ears. Some of those bones have weighted marrow, like on your tail bones, pressing down upon you in shadow from behind, as an even heavier atmosphere. The marrow is made of her unconditional love that she shared with you in kindness and sacrifice. Actions that splinter your mind, because you only know those actions in your subconscious. This is before your brain made the proper dress of hypothalamic neurons to hold memory and maternal psalms.  

No! Bad Lila Ċepa! No!” A skill saw cuts a wooden giggle short. 

She buzzed on: “You always bury your mother in your heart, where compassion confronts all misunderstanding. The heart is the hidden doorway to the soul, where you sleep in dreamland together, and you honor that sleep in flowers on your mom’s grave, monthly, (even if just in thought, as she is buried on Oahu and you roam the Midwest!) but daily, you must honor her by pillows on your bed.” 

Then, Witchy Wanda would wilt like a leather rose under winter’s wet kiss. A cold freeze usually ending with her falling out of her Eden’s defiant and invincible summer.

Before the fall, a last eloquent apple would always drop, and the leather rose would morph into Newton, channeling the gravity of the fall with ancient knowledge from a lost civilization beyond the stars, that tied up in silly string theory and applewood, the fields of physics white man misunderstood. 

The fallen apple of her wooden Indian eye, I give to you. My 211-Nazi-Cellie: Honor your bunk as a communion with your mother on the light side of dreams, when you are away from this nightly musical, darkly scripted in horror trope and gory themes. A nightly hope of a reprieve, wrestled away in the darkle necessary to change scenes on our most tarnished silver screens, as you are nestled in her etheric arms, wide as sky. Charms as deep as the cosmos. Buy pillows from canteen and place them in reverence of that dream, each morning, upon your prison bunk. An action of gratitude honoring your nightly communion with her, behind the infinite in your heart, when the mind has lost its finite to dreams of eternal reverie with no external space. Remove and place the pillows on your foot locker, in silent prayer, honoring the sacred serenity there, cued nightly, and desperately needed for such a holy communion of souls in different housing structures and gated community/density roles. 

Prison Bunk-Bed Pillows. 

Who knew that was the hard way to get a dead mother off your back. 

My Yuwipi-Granny was nothing if not ironic, with something a little off kilter. 

Translating whispers in the prison deep, like the cosmic deep, is still a bloody mystery filtered through this human view I keep sharing in love and light. Like most prisoners, this 211 acolyte chose the easy way. Despite the Witchy Wanda screenplay seance’d through a child’s eyes. My Cellie remained lost in his wilds, so I cut ties. Ties stained in blood and memory, cut in two. An Op-40/20th SF Group clue. MLK tie cut through by my alumni. My former A-team leader’s sheep-dipped dad! A comrade in generational arms in play, who had the back of the Memphis patsy, James Earl Ray. (See Chapter: Operation Head Ni**er. Wait, I didn’t name the OP!) 

Note to author: Stop sourcing your superhero powers and relive the interminable hours of prison violence and “sheety” handcuffs.

My 211-Cellie chose fist to cuffs. Did I mention “toughs” have no place in my musical. There are only trained actors and untrained actors. My training has been life-long and has sincerely terrifying factors, fraying my innocence at Luakini altars of human sacrifice. 

My tough Cellie regained consciousness with a raspberry face and his hands tied in a knotted place behind his back with his own pillow case. His six pack was super glued to the metal prison bunk, thick as a yoga mat, with smells worse than patchouli funk and hippie fat fried. His feet were tied up like rare lamb chops on a bloody dinner plate. No need for cops to spoil my supper date, the shitter/privacy curtain was drawn tight and discreet. White Nigger is tied together with his own sheet. My feathered quill probing the prostate. My 211 Cellie lying prostrate had his prison knickers up at his ankles. 

A full moon. 

He started to blush, wondering if he should swoon at the feathery kestrel that left the perch of my hand and heart and migrated south. Some would call this love. No more mouth to butt-play to impart, so I made this goon a deal painted in Coppola’s Godfather art. The real pillow-fight is between us. A meditative silence, just like your fight club minutes, or allow me a Yuwipi prophecy, hence, within the hour: Behold the power of The Heyoka Effect Pen. I use my Heyoka “Penema” with dental floss. I insert T.H.E. Pen in your anus while you’re gussied up in sheets like a cheap ghost costume on Halloween. “Piction” the most Oscar worthy scene, so “Pulp Fiction” pawn shop dirty: on T.H.E. PEN, dental floss loops like Brown Penny, then meets a ripped off bunk-mat (not mattress) tag taped to the dross at the other homo-flirty end…A plastic sign hanging out of your behind: “TAINT nothing but a pull, friend!” A cool secret Santa gift, you will find, well shared, hanging off of your anal wrapping paper. Remember, reader, of my Prison Inks on paper of my hand rocks and scissor kicks, in every Prison Secret Santa and Rochambeau caper. 

I did offer him the hard way first. He simply shared the worst within him way too easily.

Prison steampunk to cold prison punk. A phase state transition from hot to ice. A thermal dynamic feature of the soul’s self sacrifice to a violent center. 

This former Green Beret sniper-Close Quarter Battle (CQB) expert trains the self-centered (not centered man) and exposes the effects of always taking the easy way. The Heyoka in me always clowns the “hard” in “hard times,” adding “hard” lessons along the way, in golden Kintsugi lines to broken teapots and minds. 

This is Heyoka-Clown-Charm-and-Harm-School. A Master, nay, the class of the Doctorate of the “Hey Jude” cool. Or the fool in tarot hanged in spirit. The jury is still out, but population density turned this innocent grasshopper upside down and framed him as a locust. My oaths bound in poverty and non-violence, I vowed  20 years ago, lost in karmic thunderclouds staged in the pain of crowds in my Thunderdome musical. Rain Dance steps find a home on my “Hapa/Half” Hawaiian side, and the other “Iyeska/Half,” on my Lakota side. My third half is the inner Zigeuner Jew. An added dimension of a Gypsy clown in view. My whole, inner Kahuna-Heyoka weeps into pails of strawberry confetti. 

Over the prison loudspeaker, at the ready, tinny like our Ike-era green beans, soldiering on as “fresh,” revenant veggies, a crackle of electric claps the air together, like cult hands forced in prayer. 

Heads bowed in chow hall scenes: a cackle of thank you for your service in World War Two, to my plate of beans. 

CLOSE UP SHOTS of the greenish-brown mush that looks like it grows in poo, something I should flush, or is it psilocybin mushrooms. Cue: Overflowing Bathrooms that pulse. 

It’s a nice rush to honor your food in thanks and blush. Dr Masuru Emoto sowing gratitude in a field of over-fertilized Shawshanks showing that chow has become a game of chance. “Where’s it from? “Dirt or Dirty Diaper Pants?

A monotone guard drones on…in the tone of Yeats “Second Coming.” Coming from innocence stained. My oaths broken open and empty like my prison coffee cup, like my pillows on tombstones named in shadows and numbers unspoken. 

Forgive me, Witchy Wanda. I have fallen and I can’t get up. I hope I am worthy of all these teachable, empty cup/broken teapot moments. A cup, empty of myself and full of oneness. In the fullness, I’m whizzing “Dude” in yellow letters on the rug of oneness that ties every cell together. Oranges and apples squeezed fresh off of the shelf. A better, fruity life of this Heyoka’s best self. With one knot on his perfect (pee-stained) rug untied, in deference to god, the only perfection deified, honoring sage wisdom from the Lakota “Hypatia/Lebowski,” pulled off a book shelf and native bowling lanes stained in “pejuta sapa” coffee and Proustian Petite Madeleines. An inner library where pain has a chance to teach humility, with a drunken rain dance. 

Cue the Native Oglala Black Elk chants. 

After all the wisdom this “Dude” imparted, “smarty-pants-off-211-Nazi” took the Heyoka deal at cost and wholeheartedly. 

I untied, as he chose a heart to heart reel. A new genre of musical. A real vulnerable side and we flossed our teeth (No backside!) with the final line of Kubler Ross in peaceful fields of cell house tranquility.

Sorry, I couldn’t make this whole piece rhyme. I’m simply out of time, today. This day of two’s keeping me tap dancing on my toes. Strawberry wine happily lost to love and water for my Lakota Rose. Witchy Wanda, a demi-god formed by a murder of crows, I worship like Mary Crow Dog, in a Freudian slip and nosedive kamikaze slide into whistle blows of madness, that blesses this despicable con’s side, with daily independence fireworks and jerks with no brains or fear. Fuses short lit, always going nuclear in spirit, but fizzles in my Lakota rain dance. A chance for their brain storms to drizzle in and out of conscious forms. Tears like bee swarms down my original face. Buddha buzzing off, thinking the frenetic drum of Korsakov to bee, a bit sting-y. 

Ho hum, another blast off into balls clasped with my version of hold and cough. (A wee-bit pitchy!) I am the Holden Caulfield guy. My Thunder ‘Bird’ Dome is tethered to a home, far from any Catcher In The Rye. Will you join my prison book club for coffee or some strawberry Plath pie? Fresh from the oven, cooling on the prison window. Lovin’ the smells of tenderized flesh seared in prison shadow. Drooling like a canine cannibal with Pavlov ringing in the prison chow bell. Spooky doll-like-Annabelle’s reserving tables for one. Always, always the fastest sells. Reservations in “Fifth Business” ways to acceptance and the One, timed in cowbells in chow halls and cells, pounding drum circles in circles like Dante’s, with pillows for sticks and tombstones that break the circle’s loop, to connect bones in dream with the sacred Heyoka hoop, to unstitch the seam between life and death, to mine ancient pearls of sacred wisdom, from Iyeska-Wasi’chu and Hapa-Haole breath. 

I test my mind like a cantaloupe. A feel of hope, thinking it will ripen exquisitely, under a prison microscope. A prerequisite to mastering the tropes of enlightened parables, so close to madness and as invisible as the Emperor’s dress blanketing the foibles of a Mommy’s death bed wed to prison-pillow-fight-club bloodshed on sheets of strawberry red.

Meet me there?

I’ll understand if you have plans to be anywhere else, instead. Paper CUT! Check this Hell’s Gate! PRINT this musical smut using my cellmate’s pre-talkie pillow, mic’d up. A “deux ex machina moment” in prison years, spent in bad writing, with God clearly seen in the Yuwipi/Heyoka gears. What appears on day 2223 will be a Wakan Tanka mystery. Aho and Aloha as I weep with grateful "crazy/witko" tears with my 211-Cellie.