FOREWORD From T.H.E. Rosebud Thief. 
CLYKS T.H.E. Pen. Cepa, Lila. Yuwipi/Kahuna/Shaman. 

CLYKS T.H.E. Pen. The Halo Effect one, stolen from God’s pocket protector, found in my last shirt. 

Cue, not by chance, but by choice, the Ben Kingsley soliloquy voice. 

While dancing to the Doors: “Break on Through.” A remote view.

CLYKS T.H.E. Pen to Scribe the Ideogram: OPI Cassandra. A teaser for the con’s believer in the Rosebud Thief. An interior design of the sweet mind like Rene Margritte: The Human Condition. 

Divine entanglement, like quantum’s, like mirror neurons, balancing masculine and feminine. In the mind, opsins, enlightened and glowing, requires knowing the look…that when you look for the god/goddess, the god/goddess is in the mirror, in the look in your eyes. Be wary of what you look for. The mirror never lies. If you look deep enough into it, you’d source the omnipresent. 

Surprise! 

In the moment. 

Too soon? 

Take the blue pill. 

No! 

Bad matrix! 

Close your eyes. 

Bad Higgs boson! 

Bad! 

Soma pill, nap time. 

On Brave New World orders, as we’re stuck sleeping in 1984, big brother dystopian supporters. Gone is free will. No? 

Take the strawberry-red pill to hologram fields that anchor the souls’ fluff through the shine of dandelion and star stuff and heirloom seed yields. 

My ancestors weep at the loss of bounce and shine in the fields of civilization, hushed by genetic modification, dimmed by bedazzled ignorant looks. 

Tears dried to parable in books, untouched. Dusted by moths, long extinct in time. 

Secrets protected by ancestral ghosts whose whispers can penetrate my mind in stillness, but most in seance, especially when I’m feeling dyslexic, pensive in and restive out of consciousness. Here’s the Yuwipi process to this spiritual trick, this deeper connection. A tic of time and skin, oracles prick my mind, like a phantom fingered limb, ectoplasm gloved, touchy with leaves of grass. Whitman’s ghost seance’d by the wind, like a transcendentalist, worshiping oneness in nature, to denature the crass multitudes in human. 

I feel the shine of being quantum entangled with the physics of the divine. 

A science of One, beyond the bars of mind, where the souls’ formula is kept sacred and hidden, written in the secrets of the multiverse and the Wiccan. And, in the recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

But first, middle-finger-licking-bird. Before you fly, jailbird fly…Can I get a number One? 

No duality. 

No trinity, please. 

Yes. Please drive thru, cuz this one, too, shall pass. 

Selling salvation can never last, when buying wise words spoken in numerology, numbered in humble’s master class! 

CLYKS T.H.E. Pen, writing word in dreams that surpassed reason, from letters floating in the intuition streams to the akashic. 

An invincible summer in my season of darkened spirit. 

Fishing in it, locked in the grid, like steering into a skid, sentiment getting caught in a sensory net that I cast out wet, past the dream, into a dry ocean of consciousness. Blue, from scenes of imprisoned shores, to find an ocean in a droplet. 

Open Doors: Break on Through. Dry to wet. The one in my eyes. Do you see it too? 

The paradox of wealth in the mirror where poverty of spirit is seen clearer. 

The riches of heaven nearer the florid breastbone. 

Abundance, home. 

A look, through tear, I see clearer. One invisible to the material girl, nearer the spiritual world that curls energy, looping me in its loops, with the crazy curls in my locks. Prison barber giving me animal looks and talks of Zoolander, caged crazy full, as I stay human, single and heterosexual. But, entangled with something awe-inspiringly free and beautiful, something, like women, in general, I don’t really know, but even incarcerated, I can feel its benevolence moving through me. 

Tastes of real strawberry, feels the opposite of shivs in the prison library turned barber shop turned murder scene. 

Eulogy in the nightmares of my real life dream. 

My epithet: “Well read. Fresh cut look. Hell for this dead, heaven is fully booked.” 

My mothy webbed books, I read them all for fun, to burn looks in my eye, from Fahrenheit 451, to cast Hypatia grappling hooks into the cloud atlas sky. 

A sacred feminine library, under the rubble of man-made archaeology. 

No, I’m not on a burnt orange bubble of estrogen and I’m not a pre op tranny, just touching the side in me, that’s gorgeous and feminine, inappropriately, under the mountain of masculine. 

A new religion, at best, as insensible as Christianity and all the rest. At worst, it may be a bit prison-culture-culty. 

Divine entanglements. 

A perfect curse for a cancel-culture full of witchy sentiments, maced enclosed lines of convicts like sheep looking for a shepherdess, outside my locked cell door, waiting for my feminine blessings in the form of ‘prison whore.’ 

Shen nu meant goddess, now is slang for Chinese whore and means “leftover women” who are still single after a certain ‘OLD’ age, considered worthless to Chinese society. 

The sacred feminine wisdom canceled and put in a cage, puts the red breasted robin and all of heaven in a rage. Lake, CLYKS T.H.E. pen, romantic like Blake, running numbers. 27 is that old age. 

TWENTY-SEVEN! Insane. 

Same as fame’s American hearse, carrying the rockstar curse. 

Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and Morrison, Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, pigpen McKernan, Amy Winehouse and every Chinese woman, without a spouse. 

27 club honorees, two categories: with and without deals from Faust and friend. The World is fine with this, in the end?

CLYKS T.H.E. Pen, channeling Shakespeare: The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. 

I can introduce you to all flavors here.  

Monday night in the chow hall is fried chicken. A knock off of Kentucky’s, knocked off by a sacrificial wiccan. 

Let’s meet. Some days white, some days dark, middle-finger-licking princely meat. 

Ben Kingsley narrates through the grease, past the concrete, as I click click click my pen and eat, entangled in chaotic trick, trick, trick, I speak and write every moment in the light of zen.

CLYKS T.H.E. Pen, scripting the unbelievable “Cassandra” Feminine:  

When you look for a god/goddess, the god/goddess is in the look in your eyes. Every mirror sees it and communicates, via shine, with its brothers and sisters in the universal bathroom. The portal to introspection demanding the stripping of egoic spectacles of separation, skeptical stripped naked to knowing, in authentic reflections. 

The epiphany, staring into the mirror…we are all related. The Mitakuye Oyasin greeting of my people. 

The Crazy Horse/Black Elk part of my philosophy. 

The goddess is already there, as the look becomes your vision. The vision: your reality.

When you look for a hoodrat, the hoodrat is in the look in your half hooded eyes. 

 

Be wary of mirrors. 

And the looks they communicate via shine. 

Especially when that shine is yours. 

I like my prison shine. 

Holding shine like the moon. 

The shine of Cassandra, touching at aspects of truth in the dark that are too egregious to believe.  

Crypto Code Anfang: I swam with whales and felt their power and gentleness while making love to the Pacific. I swam with sharks, alongside my brother Keoni, in Hanalei, and have known their apex hunger in the highest echelons of business, politics and war. I’ve swam with turtles and known their peaceful rounds, centered. I felt free when my circles were goldfish tight, but my memory was Proustian-loose. 

A focused, fine-tuning to the frequency of my petite madeleine, to obliterate the senses that haunt my remembrance of Intelligence-things past, awaiting my own cork lined bedroom, in the digital asylum run by JTRIG. 

A P.I.E. (Propaganda, Intimidation, Elimination Protocols) Palace, as regal and chickenshit as Goebbels’, as the protocols of fascism control truths, to control the masses by secrecy. 

I have never seen a democracy more secret than our US government. 

A history more written in the invisible ink of lies, mercurial and shifting to control the future to erase truths that contend with the controlled narrative of America being represented by a benevolent Uncle, as opposed to the truth: our Uncle Sam is a genocidal, intelligence-community stooge with strings attached to the sinister. 

Puppet masters of Henchmen Banksters creating global conflicts to enrich and consolidate the powers of the Uber-elite. 

And I, with the dull and rusty blade of Damocles, hacking in futility at the strings, unable to discern the difference between theirs and mine. In my dream my mind splits at the seam. In doubt, I stitched in a scream. A devout line sewn in prison green, outs an untied thread, that pulls the nightmare from my head, leaving scars that haunt my stars, with stellar winds, tattooed as bars, under my skin. Inexplicable as Belsen, between this end scene. I awake from my holocaust, with a stainless steel mirrored grin. Grow your hair, dreadlocks to fit in. Silence the scream in prayer, deadlocked, shocked, by doubting your own doubt. 

The madman in Munch, his silent scream to come out, to straighten the seam, with probing fingers that deem, to wash the color out. 

The green of doubt, with more green, like melting snow in a forest fire dream; dripping like S’mores marshmallow cream, cleansing my leaves of grass, with mowers powered by steam. Fresh cut flowers to plant in the open grave’s silent scream. Rosebud whispers in an inexplicable meme. Crypto Code Schluss.

FREE CHAPTER OF T.H.E. ROSEBUD THIEF.

#921. The Lakota Rosebud of the Rosebud Thief.

Carl Jung: The healer’s art at its best, is insight wedded to compassion and thus medicine, no less than religion is a matter of the spirit, of the figurative part of the soul. True Medicine embraces the belief that each and everyone of us is important, and that we are all under the canopy of heaven alike. The Lakota Shamaness, Witchy Wanda, would object!  

Dedicated to Jackie Thorpe, who filled my incarcerated Christmas with Chocolate and Compassion. And, Joseph “Madman” Roybal. The Hunkpapa-Lakota-Madman-Turned-Sioux-Shaman; the science of his soul’s alchemy, a phase-state transition in a prison lab. A miracle of metamorphosis, from homo sapien to homo luminous, I was blessed to witness upon the sober ‘Red Road.’ A peek behind the mask of a true superhero. It was worth the 21 days of Hole-Time, last Christmas. The Mad Shaman is still locked up, currently stabbed 12 times with a right lung collapse, but he's free in every way. He’s also the illustrator of my Nightmarcher. The “Monster” from the Dark Side of Aloha. 

In loving memory of my Grandmother, Witchy Wanda Black Elk and her similar metamorphosis. A walking dichotomy of deep wisdom and shallow spirits, unique insight, inked from a poisoned well. An elegant, Whitmanesque stationary of contradictions, I tore in two…

BEHOLD: B.B.D.W./Lila Ċepa Winyan Sapa as the little ‘Lebowski Underachiever.’

My Grandmother was once a Sioux Shamaness. 100% Oglala Lakota. The proud ancestor of Black Elk and Crazy Horse, who often asked me: “Do you know why they hate us, so?”
The Wasi’chu/white man, I always assumed. It was always the Wasi’chu/white man. 

I yawned, shaking my head from sleep and deja vu. It was a dark five on a random summer morning. 

The music of a cowboy riding on heroism fresh from some ‘injun kill’ blew tinny and shrill, straining like a Miles Davis note held hostage in a “Rez” radio. Rez is short for ‘reservation’ but is also used in this chapter as a synonym for ‘destitution displayed.’ 

The radio’s 2-inch speaker dated back to the Marconi-inspired, Hitler-created, Volks-radio-techno-sound swooning my swaying Granny standing in the kitchen. 

The tinny hustle was the non-stealthy culprit rustling my sleep. 

The kitchen light, a jaundiced halo emanating from behind her unsteady spring was like a winter sun. An apricity adding light but no heat enhancing her spoiled-milky aura by spilling photons of sodium vapor pus upon her aged, gnarled-bark-grooved face with every heaven oriented curse she would banshee-cry out. 

She looked and sounded more like a wood nymph than Rez Indian. 

The weak light, yellow snow in feeling, wishing itself pale blue after bearing witness to such impoverished surroundings, cast her ancient-as-old-pine-shadow, faint, over the nicotine-stained, white-trimmed glass-patio-furniture-turned-yellow-kitchenette boasting a single patio-folding chair. 

A burnt, half-eaten, fried-bread-sandwich pinked out at the fifty-yard line by the zig zag routes of my granny’s wooden-tooth offensive was stuffed with a subsidized football-field of government green-cheese and hairy, brownish-black peanut-butter that basted the umami with a bonding agent, pigskin in texture and superglue in mouthfeel. A culinary paste enclosed in a stadium of yellowed to black, (color depending on how drunk and absentminded the chef) suet soaked, fried, Indian Bread that crawled, more than sat on the white, recycled paper-plate yellowed to keep the kitchen’s color scheme, Lebowski in grandeur, in front of her. 

There were crumbs of week-old chicken on the edges of the oily plate forming a half-moon perimeter. The other half mooned by half month-old scotch-fillet-gristle guarding against possible cockroach incursions marching to the center prize, the ultimate Rez-party-grub-bullseye: ‘Fresh’ Rez food for the inebriated Rez-epicure. 

Fresh, like my octogenarian Grandmother. A Sioux-sous chef that proudly boasts a monthly-lunch of ‘Boot Cuts’ sourced from Albertsons, to her home table/Rez-eatery. 

These Ribeyes were stuffed and seasoned in her non-work boots and tenderized by the walk home with groceries. These steaks, too expensive for food stamps, were always stolen for her monthly: “Sioux Specials Menu.” 

In conjunction with and celebration of: food stamps in the mail day! 16 more days till Steal-Boot-Cut-Brunch fitted with brand new paper plates! 

But, until then, we generally walk a foodie mile with a sauté’d saunter in dirty moccasins filled with spiders. 

Eating this particular, black-and-green arachnid sandwich was for us a culinary, Chelicerata masterpiece. A subphylum of art worthy of wine or insert any food stamp ‘barterable’ alcohol. 

Sommeliers noting the overtones of a sinister Dr Seuss-inspired cuisine with hints of overripe peach-like fruit-fuzz blackened by mold spores of the collective mood would applaud my granny’s choice of a 7 & 7, to wash down such creepy-crawly repast that others would clearly pass, either on, or up back through the esophagus like a liquefied Jamaican flag.

I'll close my eyes and escape my prison for a minute while all of you outside of prison Google the Jamaican flag.

(Is Google still a thing?) 

Or, go to ‘Hedonism’ in Negril. 

Yes, I’m imagining the reader naked so I can write in my cell without being so nervous. Great tip, Prison Toastmaster classes! 

Who am I kidding? Who’s reading this nonsense? Oh, you are. Well, welcome back. Hope your vacation was ‘Irie, mon!’ Oooh, no tan lines. Where was I? On vacation in Montego Bay? Yes! 

Eyes open. 

Oh no, hand cramps. Prison Prose and Cons and time travel to a Proustian green/black hairy ooze that was common in my tobacco-yellow’d, fried-bread youth. 

Currently in memory: common food-stamp rations, framed in the uncouth style of a late night/early morning drunk and slobbered-over snack. 

Proust had Petite Madeleines that brought back his memory in volumes. I have fried-tarantula-bread-sandwiches spewing predator blood congealing in blackened misery like poorly, defeathered Jamaican-Jerk chicken without the chicken. 

(Is there an island breeze in my Colorado cell? Yes. Me.) 

This government-farm-fresh-to-table-sourced-sandwich crawled back and forth with the moving shadows of my granny’s head shifts. 

A disoriented tarantula with a contact buzz who couldn’t decide between chicken or beef at the wedding of crazy to broke. 

My spirit-subsidized granny’s eyes, half-hooded, but back-lit by its own nuclear-powered energy source, flashed to high beams and froze me in front of her. A tractor-beam with a tundra of dirty-ice-gray-wild behind them. A spirit-saturated ice cube, exorcized by native agitation in her rocks glass in between us, released the chilly Spirit of perpetual winter devoid of a Norman Rockwell Christmas. 

Full of trick-or-treaty soul. 

A trickster Spirit which possessed me as I was stuck in the wrong Halloween costume from last year’s Cowboys and Indians discount bin. 

Back then, even young Indians were programmed with knowing the right and wrong costumes. 

Pine Ridge Indian Reservation on fire outside in the gloaming. 

A cold Newspeak-heat I never warmed up to, during my 1984’s Orwellian chill. A fevered shiver symptomatic of white man' s addiction to gold and other things shiny. 

Big brother, a brash, rhinestone cowboy playing a sheepish Santa with wolfish intentions. His Red-Riding-Hood and Yellowstone-bejeweled-bag filled with more gifts of bullets, oppression and dystopia than Orwell, provided our tipis with X-mas trees and lit them on fire, immolating our Grandmother’s sage and destroying our Tunkashila’s sacred hoop with a bonfire of holiday lies and conflict-filled folklore, fanning the flame to some all-consuming statistics that burned ostentatiously, like Christmas tinsel in mid-July, hanging off of our houses that were made of dirt and dawn. 

Now, as Twain quipped: “There are lies, damn lies and statistics.” Pine Ridge, in 1984, had 90% alcoholism (Gas) and 90% unemployment-rates (Match). 

No. Truth, damn truth, and fiery statistics. 

It was hard not to see and feel the heat of those numbers. It felt like 666 before the apocalypse. Ghost-pepper bonfires of End-Times with scovels that scorched my already singed, fifteen year-old fire-sign-astrology cementing a hellish eschatology into my daily horoscope. 

My drunk-unemployed grandmother, just another well-engineered statistic of the American-vanquished-foe ruminating on vanishing probabilities of a revitalized culture. 

All part of the haunted-house numerology of those whose days are bleak, cursed and numbered. 

The Rez was a ghost town that was haunted by people. Indians cursed by white man’s spirits, both living and dead. Drunk off cheap moonshine that smudged our soulshine long ago. 

Our Sun-Dance set permanently in the white man’s Footloose horizon leaving behind red streaks possessed by the gravity of hope’s downfall pressing upon the red man with the weight of a martian atmosphere. Lost is our higher vision, as our eyes are cast perpetually downward, looking for the moon in our ponds, searching for the sun at our feet. 

Disoriented by the inverted symbols around us, we ceremony in quiet despair until our natures are upturned. Our blood rushes to our heads until we feel light-headed and airy and the ceremony starts to spin with our discordant musings and we drink to stop the spin of thoughts until intoxicated to belligerence. 

So, our world spins again. 

Our despair rages into a vertigo of war, to try and right our spin with nature. We charge, wobbly with white Hoover flags of empty pocket destitution, too dizzy with drunk to be a heroic Ira Hayes, raising the flag at Iwo Jima. Our flags, constantly raised in futile surrender, are hung over our empty buffalo-soup-lines as we thirst as native Americans for a new ‘New Deal’’ soft drink for our generation. An Elixir that will grant us with insights to prosperity and happiness, as our reality sticks us with Mad-Dog-2020-fevered-visions that lead us into hunger and starvation. Hungry for a modern day FDR for our Great Depression. Starving for a new messiah for our inebriated souls. Praying for one native hero/savior metaphor for the last few sentences as we see one of our own heroes, Ira Hayes, dead drunk in a Pima gutter. 

The realities of our people are surrounded in perpetual defeat by the oppressor’s shadow, the oppressor’s laws, the oppressor’s culture, and most painful to my drunk Grandmother, the oppressor’s religion:

“Our Native collective spirit suffers from a race trauma so deeply ingrained, it is now genetic.” My drunk Granny went on to pontificate in a whisky-fueled whisper, sometimes losing vowels to slur, and hearing consonants glued together with peanut butter fuzz. 

“A race trauma lodged within the morphogenic grid of genocide and relocation away from our sacred lands is distracting us from our teleology.” 

“What’s teleology, Granny?” I asked, still rubbing the sleep and deja vu from my eyes. 

“Purpose. Our sacred purpose. Earth was our collective Hanbleciyapi. Our collective cry for a higher vision. The Heyoka/Sacred Clown Way.” 

My Grandmother barked ‘Heyoka/Sacred Clown’ with a carnie stammer. The words circling marks in awe filled reverence, like a magical “Step Right Up” in her mind, but finding only my indifferent teen circus. 

She was the ringmaster of my Big-Tipi-Top still standing with clown shoes too big to fill from the night before, pulling another swig of her 7 & 7, and putting it down perfectly without looking, upon the singular water ring on the glass table. 

She needed a free hand to unsuccessfully straighten her frizzy grays and whites from Einstein’s stature to Iwo-Jima-Marine-Veteran. 

After a second attempt swept futile, her hand retreated to her cocktail in exasperation, and the wars of her thirsty mind were temporarily quenched by surrender to Canadian Whisky. The Einstein do would remain the hairdo. (Think clown wig on a dark, scarred moon, but viewed through the lens of a monochromatic, pre-talkie-camera with Georges Melies as director.) 

The Semper-Fi-Vet fell in battle and would not take part in the Heyoka transformation. A Sacred Clown metamorphosis worthy of Ovid. 

Something I will never forget. Not simply because I thought it was so special. More so because it happened so often. 

It started with a haunted melody that I could never hear. An intense concentration beyond the definition of Heisenberg Uncertainty sparked a quantum fire of connection entangled with a distant Wanagi-spirit-star. 

There was an excess build-up of static electricity that jolted her drink back, tabled to that one-ring circus, freeing her red right hand to grab the chair, if needed, to tame the imaginary lions always on the dark penumbra of her clouded, mental spotlight. 

A light bit of stretch, like the Dude’s physical warm-up in the Big Lebowski’s pre-bowling workout regimen. 

Her cigarette pressed between her thin wood-reed lips. Then, a palpable crackle in the stale kitchen air scored in saxophone. 

An unheard strike from a far away bowling alley is seen in her eyes. The bowling alley moves into her mind. 

The lightning strike moves from her mouth to her left hand. My Grandmother loses herself to those metaphysical lanes. The crackle persists in a volume ‘Spinal Tapped’ to 11. 

Pins popping and snapping like Rice Krispies swimming in spilled milk, outside the bowl. A crackle that emits steamy huffs and puffs of dry cleaning gears spun by her well lubed, cognitive cogs. Through the fog, I witnessed my crazy Grandmother starch her character with a gleam of pride in her eyes. A glimmer of deep-atavistic knowing of some ancient, dirty laundry cleaned and pressed, straightened her back, to stop her inebriated sway. 

Her shoulders gradually expanded back to the time-phlegmed-over-circle-of-light behind her, like her rib cage could no longer contain the size of her heart broken in two. 

Her arms shot out straight in front of her with a report, like she was ready to tango with General Custer’s ghost. 

She flamenco’d her palms to the Pleiades. Up, with an audible snap, as woodbine smoke did supersonic jet swirls in the periphery of my eastern skies. The upshot of cigarette exhaust from the firefly dipping under her left hand and held steady below her straightened arms and fingers firm embrace. 

Her head whiplashed back in a snap. Hair to jaw positioned parallel to our asbestos and lead-paint-covered ceiling, as if a Yuwipi (Lakota Seance) Ceremony had conjured a deity’s disembodied voice, mellifluous with firewater and ectoplasm, and that voice summoned her from a heavenly tipi, demanding third eye, thermo-nuclear contact. 

She closed her eyes to the ceiling and her outstretched hands pulled back from an imagined Sun Dance at Little BigHorn to her physicist frizz, massaging her upturned head like reading braille in the language of phrenology, with fingers signing a smoky glossolalia. 

In a cigarette sfumato’d halo, she lulled, breathed in deeply and exhaled mindfully, like her closed eyes were looking for something just outside of the week-old chicken-bit-perimeter-of-mental-awareness on her native-greased-plate-of-consciousness. 

Her catcher’s mitts for hands, reaching to a dramatic “Citizen Kane,” ‘Declaration of Principles’ ceiling shot, shifting from her head up past the crown chakra. Her arms moved up to bracket the divine vortex with her elbows before hitting her mark. 

A frozen ballerina pose. 

She looked like a Wakinyan (sacred wing/thunder) and lightning shattered oak using the wind to work the sound of her leaves. 

She bristled more than spoke and sculpted her word in a baritone of other-worldly-authority, rasped by nearly a century of peace pipes and grated by Inipi (purification) smoke, in chilling and complete, “Promising Young Woman'' sobriety:  

“Your lineage, if you only knew, was designed by Star People to be in communion with Nature. Angelic souls chosen for divine human experiences on planet Earth. 

We were once one with the land, metaphysically and physically. We had no words in our ancient languages for ‘separate.’ There were no words for ‘Other,’ or ‘Over There.’ That oneness, we would call the language of nature, spells of Wakan Tanka in greetings like Mitakuye (We are all related) Oyasin. 

As greetings connected and shaped our world, telluric forces played with the plasma surrounding our auras, just as the wind, drawn from our vast and unbroken prairies of power and mystery, enjoyed playing in our hands. We embraced the power of its mystery until we were one with it. 

In that unity, bio-photonic spindles were dispatched off of our Oglala DNA to reach back into the past, into the very recycled stars our elementals source their origin, source our people, source our home. 

This home in the stars is a historical repository of divine tradition. A spiritual connection to our future experiences on Earth that knows no linear time. We were supposed to mold the present moment with that cultural, historical, and spiritual guidance. It was to know a oneness that transcends in wonder, even the duality of human love. 

And now, that holy, Heyoka trinity of guidance is gone. Burned like the Library of Alexandria. I am the Lakota Hypatia. Lost Librarianess of the astral and Midwest plains. Exiled stewardess of the stars and dandelions. 

I am the Lakota Tekla. Self-baptized-archivist of Thunderbird-storm clouds and the words of ancient gods, both benevolent and feared, that descended in flame-filled Rainbow’d tipis. 

I am the last, dying chronicler of the selfless actions of our native saints.” 

She paused, as ash fell like Wednesday from her high-flying cigarette, demanding penance, foreshadowing a dust of Easter snow, marking her third eye with beliefs lent from the enemy. 

She continued with her syncretisms, unperturbed by smudged visions: “I speak in fragments of broken history that smolder. Its smoke written in the ether, in heroic calligraphy, scripted from our noble civilization lost. 

The White Man, like Cyril’s mob, through self-appointed sainthood, murdered our own hagiography and buried them under the debris of our great libraries of oral tradition. Now, our traditions are paved over by our conqueror’s mythic tales in print. Our Native heroes were rubbed out by the ‘Damnatio Memoriae’ erasers of Wasichu-written history, driven from the snowy white pages of print into a white-out blizzard of silence, to freeze upon the quiet edges of the page, where the word of our oral history dies in the cold margins, along with every one of our Saints. 

Mountains, in themselves. Or, mountain movers. Omnipotent in the storytelling around our hegemonic central-plains’ fires. 

Now, the roar of our great nurturing flame has been muted under the ashes of defeat. Self-stoking, burning embers of defiant aggression, blinking out the heart lights of our elevated awareness; weaving a membrane of dust-bowl filth and ashy filament, forming a dark, claustrophobic mist around our native hearts, dimming our luminosity; that conduit to the wisdom, light years beyond the stars. 

As our outer nature responds to our inner nature, as above; so below connects the within and the without. Our without is our everything. A scarcity mentality that our natures mirror in darkened perception. 

Tunkashila, the Great-Grandfather of Lakota Wisdom, has finally succumbed to neglect in a white man’s old-folk’s home. His funeral pyre lit with 100-proof, GMO-grain alcohol. Biochemical weaponry of the enemy. 

Mother Nature, an ashy projection of our burned but still nurturing hearts, forced to perform Suttee, immolating herself like a newly widowed Hindu upon the ‘Man’s’ pyre. And we witness her conflagration in silence.”  

Breaking form: “With not a single s’more in sight.” Looking at me and my light skin color in exasperation with discernible undertones of fuzzy curiosity.  

Reacquiring form: “Our sacred Black ‘Paha Sapa’ Hills framed by this fire. Warhol’d with a pop art stamp of Rushmore alum, kitsch-colored in different shades of white. Blessed and built with our gold, like a white man’s: ’Fuck The Native Man!’ graffitied across our stained glass sanctum sanctorum.” 

“Grandma. You swore.” I pointed out, a bit shocked.  

Without missing a Sioux drum beat, she swore on: “Our Vatican, the Black Hills, contained the pine needle that stitched the quilt between forest, Oglala and sacred mystery (Wakan Tanka). This blanket was used in our ceremony to give language to fire, to sit with the rains, to picnic near the Great River. 

Now, the sacred smoke signals we can no longer translate. Animals and humans have lost the ability to speak the same language, losing meaning to sfumato and satiation. The quilt burns with wisdom that is lost to the flame; one elder-funeral-pyre at a time. 

Our native hymns now sung around these fires in a foreign tongue we will never understand. Chants filtered through constrained hearts full of poetry off key. 

Our own Ghost-dance wishes for more harm are swirled by vengeance, righteous indignation, and reciprocity. 

The exact steps that lost us the rains.  

Our heirloom seeds, bequeathed to us by our royal, ancestral plant-kingdom, used to rise towards the sun with uninhibited tendrils that touched the miraculous. Where the miracle started with the seed in hand, itself. Seeds, scattered by the same ancient powers that scattered the universe, now strangled by dry, arid Rez-dirt like Pegasi chained to broken plows. Lost is their flight in the sun. Their wings weighted with memories of our subjugation and ashed by the poison ink of broken treaty and colored by the congealed human blood of lost wars. This ash is blended with our rage creating tattoos of defiance that sleeve our earth's warrior caste. A conflict that killed our seed.”  

She broke form and pulled her hands down with her opened red eyes and stared intently at her fingers. They looked more like bratwurst made of pig’s blood than human appendages. As she stared at them in disbelief, they asked her to speak from a handy German perspective, reminding her that Hitler modeled his concentration camps after our Indian Reservations. She flew off in holocaust style with frenetic, reverse, jazz hands. 

Sign languaging ‘dazzle.’ 

A Stevie Wonder, mid-music-head-shake shook until the imagined smells of Wurst focussed her gaze on the tips of her dancing sausage digits. She slowed them to a waltz as Lawrence Welk’s big band sound directed her from the small German radio. She closed her eyes while still staring at her now, stilled hands, hovering around her heart like she was imagining a bigger cup size. "Empty of herself, full of oneness," Witchy Wanda would always say. 

From her hand’s perspective, she continued: 

“The hand of conflict shares with everything it holds dear, the nature of conflict. Hands that hold at arm’s length, in separation, the sick Earth. A planet that should be embraced as one. A sickness we Lakota women feel, viscerally, in our heavy hearts. For how can we not feel such weight upon our heartlands? 

It is the weight that broke our spirit, that made adversarial, the very fabric of space-time, like the small-pox-laced blankets (biological weaponry) the white man gave to comfort us, after taking our homes, our land, and our White Buffalo (Psychological Warfare). 

Our present has become unmoored from the shores of dignity. Adrift, far from our necessary lands of Sioux sovereignty; the treasure map to our true Heyoka purpose. 

What flows in your blood are forgotten memories of warrior archetypes so fierce, so ingenious, so one with the cosmos, that they would frighten any white man into misunderstanding. Force them to take up guns, to build armies, to destroy that lineage. Which is exactly what they did. 

We, as a people, know intuitively, that genetically laced to the helix of our Sioux DNA are shamanic, healing modalities that would simultaneously mystify the masses, whilst, commanding the assembly of new witch hunts amongst their majority, so all-consuming, new pyres would be seen from outer space. Flames that burn bright, the martyrs of our future Heyoka covens. 

Because we know how to heal with plants, they call us women, witches. Because we know how to live off the land, sustainably, they call us Indians, savages. Because we speak the language of original Stillness, not religion’s Original Sin, they call us Shamanesses, illiterate, superstitious heretics. Because, even drunk, we ‘illiterate-heretical-witchy-savages’ understand an all encompassing holistic philosophy that is not in the Wasi’chu religious or school books. A philosophy that reads scholarly, the quiet language of rain. That holds the prophecies of the wind, fast with clothespins, on lines of time that stretch past the infinite. That finds divinity sparkling within all facets of nature’s diamond. And health…”  

She stopped abruptly, broke form, and looked up from her hands, to take a good look at me. 

Drunk Indian eyes finding difficulty focusing, so her Shamaness Vision was summoned to fold me into her intuition. 

She refocused to drunk and sighed: “You sickly child!” 

A quick transformation back to original, vogue pose, and the statue marbled sincera, without wax, to wax further, poetically: “Genuine health is found only within that communion with nature. Something we are removing ourselves from, with an ML King sized, tranquilising effect of gradualism, to make room for economy, commercial interests, and more parking spaces. 

As the moons of the Heyoka wane, the Sun shines on our native sons, tending to parking lots instead of crops of heirloom seeds. Our most valuable inheritance from our ancestors, squandered on biotech kitsch. The road to nutrition paved over with unhealthy Franken-science. The blessings of our food is more of a relationship with commerce than with nature.”  

She paused, broke ranks with that heavenly tipi, again, and looked down in evident disbelief at her Big-Brother inspired, possibly Soylent-Green branded, square of singed protein.  

She was caught in the web of government sponsored nutrition weaving unhealthy steps to fascism. A spider that crawls as food. Food with no soul. 

Before regaining her frozen, Tai-Chi-like composure of a standing lotus-position with raised, alcohol-and-nicotine mudras of heightened awareness, her head stopped, midway to her facial genuflection that held heaven’s gaze. 

Her eyes went unfocused on a painting of dogs playing poker on the smoke-stained wall above the kitchen table. Her mind sees a long-forgotten time of communion and cards with her cousin Black Elk. 

A dog’s, spaded-royal-flush refocused her on what was at stake, as she repositioned to an ice sculpture in the dog days of summer: 

“We must remember, we are a constant visual reminder of how inhuman, human can be.”  

Witchy-Wanda, her sculpture melting back to my wasted Grandmother, still up, moist with fermented perspiration from the night before. 

A 7&7 in her right hand, again. A cigarette in her left, always, deep between the middle and ring fingers. When she smoked, she looked like she was coquettishly stifling a wooden laugh. The bruised orange glow, a firefly in her gesturing hands speaking in poignant light semaphore, making no sense at the time.  

“Do you?” She tapped the screen of my reality with her cigarette for a response. In sleep and sickly-child mode, I had none. 

But, mostly because I forgot the question. 

So she tried with her drink hand, “Do you know why they hate us so?” 

Spilling 7 & 7 on my dirty feet, before continuing with a Big-Band sway and a Miles Davis rescue from the radio, to blow a trumpet-like-accusation, strained, but with perfect lyrical diction. An almost ‘Kind of Blue’ sublime pitch: “Well, not you, Curtis ‘Lila Cepa Winyan Sapa’ Lake. The ‘Iyeska’ (half-breed). The reverse apple.” 

She sang the words Iyeska and apple, like a fugue from Bach, more than said. 

“You are a Red Indian on the inside, but White Man on the outside. They don’t know yet how to hate you. They can’t see you…to not see you.” 

“Oh yeah, that totally makes sense, Granny. Is it cuz I’m so skinny I can hang glide on a Doritos chip?” I asked, sincerely. 

“No. Stupid question!” She slurred. 

I thought there were no stupid questions. As she assured me of my error, her subtext, reinforcing the error of the white patriarchy, was the underlying force needed to transform her back into frozen wood nymph. 

Lost was the overripe drunken glow, that shined ‘check engine light’ bright, replaced by the somber funerary pyre seen from the horizontal space of the hearse. Hands reaching out of an open casket, past the sunroof, settling for the heavens, just out of reach. 

The only difference, a blooper of prior vogue form; a drink back in her right hand, held steady, at the same altitude with the omnipresent cigarette in her left. Both hands, high above her upturned head. Her elbows, slightly arched, like un-pulled choked-cherry bows. Arrows from a native-mystic quill, of sparkling, sober-Pegasus-winged-diatribe flew from the past into my immediate future: 

“The unenlightened white man always hates to see those they hurt the most. Unfortunately, they only see with their eyes, so they put those they hurt, here on the Rez. Remote desolate lands where only despair can grow. Well out of range of their seen horizons. Now, those with no empathy and only sociopathic tendency, don’t mind what they see. They cannot love or hate. Their species, black, white or red, is one of utter indifference. They are inherently disconnected and feel not, the subtle vibrations of tenderness that comes from human connection. Lost upon them, is the connectivity of a pre-Jungian, native, collective consciousness. They have never been cardholders to the Lakota version of the Akashic library, or any other branch. Nor can they discern the higher forces of love and compassion that emanate from Wakan Tanka ‘the Force behind all things.’ 

I usually have no desire to place light on such darkness, but these are the powers, behind the negative forces, that indeed…control this world.  

They are descending souls, while we are ascending.  

Life is made up of these relationships of demonic downs and angelic ups. Superscripts of angels and subscripts of demons in peaks and troughs riding inverse frequency waves, facing each other upon our earthly bandwidth. This is not a Tesla-Marconi-like conspiracy. Simply an elitist plan that has manifested through sheer force and an unstoppable will, which is required for the kind of power they desire. 

Descent can be fearful. Descenters mask those fears with earthly possessions and ranks of nobility and title, replete with desires that overwhelm their sleep, leaving them frantic in their waking hours, sleep deprived and anxious, looking for ways to deprive you of your solitude and sleep, while not offering you any real company. To distract you from your ascent, so you can fall within the non company of their misery. So, you should be aware that their kind exists. They walk among us. They are usually very well respected and powerful. But, I am not speaking of their darkness here. I speak of those who were lured by hate to stray from goodness. Their own intrinsic goodness. The bridgehead of goodness that exists in every one of them, and in every person, with the exception of those previously mentioned. The part of them that knows, and is, unity consciousness; that divine ‘Wakan Tanka/Great Mystery’ intelligence that is the underlying principle of reality. And, that principle is within us all; from that principle, we know intimately, all of those we hurt. That knowledge can be very painful, so the white man usually tries to bury that information, like the bones of our ancestors at Wounded Knee. This archaeology of past aggression is buried in their subconscious, which lies just under the threshold of our glorious awareness, where we visit when we are most grateful; in the dreams of our best self. 

But, venture into this same realm with ingratitude and unresolved ghosts, and you’ll find, every time, haunted thoughts appearing in the subconscious murk. Shadows form, manifesting into what Tibetans call a ‘Tulpa.’”  

“Granny, how do you know Tibetan stuff?” I inquired.  

“All knowledge comes not from a single culture. Wisdom is universal!”  

She went on, not breaking form: “Tibet has a philosophy stemming from a co-creative multiverse of thought, where shadowy, negative thoughts clothed in pain, are allowed to gather in the hush. Then, the shadow crouches and targets. The worst in them springs forth to manifest, permeating into their characters as a conscious hate for self. We see this in the Wasichu. And when they see those they hurt, like us, that hate for self can be projected upon us, because we were one of the causes, that allowed for their own worst sense of beingness; of devastating humanness. One does not need the Dalai Lama to know that genocide is the race trauma we chose to hold in our hearts through our blood. We are the receivers. The White Man are the givers. The tension inherent in our life is the reality of the vanquished, in this necessary relationship.” 

She stopped, quiet, bristling to a full body wave, spilling her drink and ash-ing more of her home roll in her lacy hair, before regaining the stillness of her ocean. Her silence rolled to me. A mysterious wave that crashed against my ear as I braced for something personal. 

“Iyeska, you half-breed!,” she screamed like the Sioux Squaw of her youth building her first, roaring fire. A barbaric yawp of Whitmanesque architecture that fell victim to the arson of time. Without looking at me, she cautioned in somber form, almost shrinking an inch, as dying embers within her fire lost its sullen glow: “You have both sides in you. Take care not to hate part of yourself. That is a conflict you won’t survive.” 

“Ok, Grandma, I won’t.” I remember lying. 

In my mind’s eye, she was stirring a cauldron of crazy with a broken broom handle. Her bewitched brew bubbled and boiled to a curse that comes from getting high on your own supply. As she felt herself fading, her sculptured Winter’s Tale reanimated her near-frozen, Shakespearean form of melt and wilt, and hastened the cadence of her stirrings with urgency and stillness.  

She steadied her pose, as if she was modeling nude for God’s canvas, and ranted: 

“Know this! All relationships are necessary synchronicities. Some provide a duality that can only be transcended by forgiveness from both sides. Especially if that is the life lesson…” 

My Grandmother trailed off, eyes of drunken vertigo spinning over hills of better times, so I thought I’d bring her back to the present with a prompt:  

“How do you know it’s your life lesson, Granny?” I asked, slowing her spin, bringing her in at the perfect angle, back into our atmosphere. Back under cloud cover. 

She broke through the ceiling and landed with an: “Umphff, that’s another dumb question. Reality is a mirror reflecting your thoughts, your life lessons are in that mirror!” 

“Oh yeah, sorry Grandma, I forgot,” I mumbled, marveling at my air traffic controller skills. 

“We do not experience anything by accident,” she declared matter of factly, with a garbled flight-plan logged. 

“The brave souls attract experiences that seem impossible. They choose extremes, so when they find their balance, they are centered in their universe, and have worthy panoramic views. Extremes, like the kind of forgiveness we must have as humans for other humans. As Oglala Natives, for the white man. And, of course, forgiveness for the self. Something impossible to do for most. Therein lies the cosmic lesson for us. Without self forgiveness, you have unforgiveness. A weed of consciousness in the white man, that flowers in the gardens of their mental landscapes to inflict our Edenic wilds. An evil that blossoms within, murders good, and walks into the funeral dressed in white. Disrespectful and laughing. Jeering at the mortician's make-up job, because he couldn’t powder the dead well enough, to look ‘more white.’ 

While the good, resurrects like the sun, daily, searching for the whole, authentic self that existed before the hell-paradigm-shift, only to be crucified at every moonrise, by the same, now, all pervasive hate. 

The dark night of descending souls.  

Amidst all that inner turmoil, all those daily lives and deaths and rebirths coupled with self-inflicted tortures of inner guilt, is the violent abyss of descending darkness, enveloping the white man’s sacred shine and putting it on display in their museums of hurt and their churches of fear. Their hurt and fearful hearts projected to frame our reality. 

They become the proverbial ‘They,’ in their own Christ Figure’s maxim: ‘They know not what they do.’ That must be said of anyone who holds hate in their heart.” 

She lost herself for a moment in self reflection. She found her footing to go on: “The white man has lost his goodness by the actions of broken peace treaties, stolen land, decimated culture and worst of all, the genocide of 100 million natives to this continent, including a lot of your ancestors. Fortunately, Wakan Tanka, the force that moves within all things will have balance. The white man’s culture is wholly imbalanced, and is therefore, along with the hate they hold for us, moribund, awaiting burial. It is at this funeral, the Shamanic traditions will rise to heal the Koyaanisqatsi (Hopi word for out of tune with the rhythms of nature) imbalance, and maintain the land in stewardship. Communing with nature, as we were meant to, to truly know the Divine. 

Your relative, Black Elk, stood upon the high hill of his great old age and bequeathed us such a peaceful prophecy. The most glorious part of this all…is you, Lila Ċepa Winyan Sapa, my little “Dancing Warrior,” (suppressed buffalo-jerky giggle) will bear witness. You will play a part. How big of a part…is completely up to you.”

“Yeah Grandma, I’m good. I got boxing practice today.” I said as I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

Witchy Wanda wilted when she sat, and eventually passed out at the dining-room-patio-table, but not before mumbling incoherently, about never meeting a man that could love.  

The word, ‘forgiveness’ punctuated the feathery, fading, drunken diatribe with an airy, ironic disgust used as missiles attached to various ordinances of expletive, exploding at different altitudes around her head plastered to the glass table. Targeting the wars, both internal and external, that raged in her Orwellian 1984. 

Her cigarette was still lit. The Swan song of a dying firefly. A dirge from a viking funeral in a hand-made, wooden boat with the masthead on fire, floating on a glass sea. Ash rings her left ring finger. A symbolic wedding to vice, as her “I do’s” to her last 7 & 7, added up to “one too many,” down her drunken bridal mile.

“When Doves Cry” on the radio, serenading the loss of her princess ways. The loss of her royal peace.  

When I finished with the outhouse, I came back to see her slumped over her kitchen throne. Her face flattened by the see-through glass of the patio table, looking more like a 4X4, dryad-cut of ribeye with deep marbling and an ashy ‘X’ rating from the USDA, from my glassy-eyed, child’s view. 

My minty breath sighing into an asparagus field of smell. Warm pee dripped off the white and yellow stained, woven-nylon-straps of her patio folding chair. Both Shamaness and chair, previously suffering from homelessness, recently in remission. 

Piss puddling to a clear lake beneath her. Flatulence forming ripples in slow motion, fading, unfortunately, to a mirror with an ammonia-whiskey’d-cocktail-smell. Seagram’s 7, alcohol’s asparagus, garnishing our kitchen-turned-outhouse with gross granny funk. Done to make the patio furniture feel less homeless-sick.

The empty gallon of Seagrams 7 and three, empty 2-liter bottles of 7-Up bear stoic witness, knowing the unholy numerology of complicity for those whose numbers are up. Utterly zen in their emptiness. 

Urine ocean. A double-jaundiced, mirrored version of Witchy Wanda’s drunk ass falling out from the worst angle, in the worst light. 

The micturated linoleum, matching the yellow kitchenette, really tied the room together in my little-Lebowski, overachieving memory. Remembrances of Lakota Feng Shui, with a wee bit of wisdom from things past. All before six in the morning.

20 years later, I found out my Lakota Name meant: “Big Black Dyke Woman.” My Grandmother always told me it meant “Dancing Warrior.” 

She kept that secret till her deathbed. Right before she passed, she enlightened me with a note and a surreptitious grin. A punchline end to a lifetime of clown and joke outside the drunken glimpses of something shamaness’d. A native feminine finesse to the supernatural Heyoka. 

Her words that were muted by the garden-variety idiocy of youth are now the rose petals of my winters. The lush, fecund gardens of my invincible native summer. Her wisdom, my Rosebud, alive and flowering in my heart, beating like a Sioux drum; a path to my own native enlightenment despite my incarceration. In this cell, I resurrect her intimate revelations. Unlocking doors of stillness, opening to the infinite; leading to a relationship with the cosmos. Her words, casting shamaness spells from the past, that echo into my future, as words to live by in the present.  

Her firefly, my Wanagi spirit, I channel, as I chant and drum proudly, a Heyoka. The sacred, cross-dressing clown of the Lakota, with a perpetual wink in my eye, revered for prophecy and compassion. An equal blend of masculine and feminine energies. A spiritual “Winkt,” (Lakota for gay) knowing intimately, that the secret to life is being in on the cosmic joke, and dressing appropriately.

In prison, my tipi door made of Momaday Dawn, faces the horizon, so I can sing to the rising sun in wasted “Wicasa Wakan” Wanda’s lush words. I tattooed them upon my heart because I have a bad memory and they felt important to know, to correctly bless the morning. (And the prison food that granny’s subsidized nutrition, prepared me very well for.) 

I am the modern Heyoka. Ecce Captivus Homo. Behold the incarcerated Man. I am Lila Cepa Winyan Sapa. The dancing “Wacipi Akicita” warrior yields the prison dance floor to my inner Big Black Dyke Woman. That’s my double M.O. Modus Operandi and Mitakuye Oyasin, torn in two, then glued back together with sticky words from Witchy Wanda's drunken lips. Yes. I now identify as a big black dyke woman. It makes me quite popular in prison.

Cliffhanger notes in Hapa/verse: Misty Paha Sapa hops/brewed in the alpine mountain tops/white washed by sunlights/on high beams. Summit origami with pointed peaks/folded in dreams/and layers/past the horizon speaks/to Lakota you/in cardinal tissue/and lost prayers. Our sacred black hills/native wills/contested. Our stolen/holy land/plagued by white man/bested by gold fever. The true Christian believer/says love thy neighbor/except the native nigger/for those neighbors/you can rape their women and children/and graffiti their Vatican/with a presidential stamp/after removing the Lakota/to a/concentration camp/they called a/reservation. Our nation/one with the land/cracked in two/the holy trinity of the sick white man/with no connection to spirit/the white buffalo/or you/one with the land/especially if his pretend god/can be used/to put gold/in the hand. Fuck the white man.