the smoke curls & writhes with furious passion through the thick musk of a sooty set of walls, one tiny light cascades itself parallel to the thick clouds diving from her lips & into the air.
stare, level to your eyes, transfix yourself to the things you breath life into. these animals of smoke, these foggy cumulus-like serpents.
shamans & hunters, crop harvesters & native corn gatherers,
howling with wolves, feather-skulled beings,
growers of the tobacco plant & the like,
their spirits entwine with the roots of this land,
our forests & fields; ghost-lands,
stems & branches; phantom-hands,
they send their snakes a'rattling through the dark of this room as the omen; the message. the remembrance. the remorse.

through each sway & convolute movement in the canned heat, hisses fill the sky of the room
turns & curls seeming exactly like the tendrils of a madman with his happy dagger
tense & sweaty clutched in his firm grasp as he shakes,
his tribe had danced the religion;
careened & cavorted with angelic motions on the once-sacred earth, holy lands, blessed landscape
fury through steps, fulfilling the prophecies of the medicine man.

can you hear them?
can you feel the terrain as is trembles & shakes in rhythm & unison?
diving & dipping through the night & the screeches of song,
flowing, floating, circle-dance around the fire as sparks shoot up for their final destination- tiny explosion in the dark.
but what is this?
man, woman, elder, child, moon, bear, horse & feet; cease celebration!
here they come, the frontier apaches on horseback & vengeance & greed, they race with the white-man's fire that shoots through the mouth of a loaded pistol
swift & urgent, 'STOP!'
flustering tumult, the fire escapes it's gates & all hell breaks loose
dark-skinned limbs become prisoners or stiffened cadavers as the blood is spilled, creating the pact
it has now been done, a deal sealed with red vitality gone sour.
the circle has been broken & it's perimeters simply raise in the form of unsettled dust surrounding the diseased campfire.
the night has been murdered along with it's elders & witch doctors
with a final breath as he lays, binded by rapacity of hoggish gun-men, he calls to the serpents and the roots that are the veins of the land
they are the new shamans & narrators of the past who have been sworn to recount the kidnapping of this country.

& here they appear in this tiny garage, as they twist & wriggle.
they dance for you & i, man, woman, elder, child, moon, bear, horse & feet;
tell us that we are born, raised & buried in a graveyard of haunted dancers.
& that we are born, raised from, buried by, the spawns of slaughter.

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