Pills of Paranoia (an ode to our land)
By Ben Estrada

Our house was built with rubber cement and plastic walls and sticks of fallen trees. Our residency resembles tumbling dice and burnt matches. We are the citizens of an idea that never  arose, laughing at the next man as he grabs a rose and bleeds from the thorns. Our oxygen is laced with humility, while the heads twist and shout and spin until they snap, crackle, and pop.
  
The children cry and run their tin cups across the cyclone fences of the town. Movement doesn't arrive in action but in thoughts. Comfortable in our daily routine, ceremonious virtue that labels us alive. Freedom is not a right, freedom is only allowed. My machete breaths deep every night and watches the twitching eyelids, while the statues of past heroes mumble in drunken slurs. Our love is a turbulent flight over the desert and our hate has been bottled up, sold conveniently at the local market.
  
My glasses are scratched from political jargon, while our house has been On Sale for two hundred and thirty years. Native reservations have transformed from wastelands to toxic wastelands, teenagers  sniff glue and coke side by side the elite money makers. Junkyard dogs of the neighborhood sniff the air, for the times they are a-changin'.
  
The carnival has long overstayed their welcome and won't leave town. At midnight we citizens march with pitch forks and torches in hand, prepared to drive out the demons. But our weapons melt and disappear and we stand still, frozen in time. Aching spinal cords slouching into another day, digging up the earth and scattering the new era. The wildest seeds are thrown by even wilder beasts.
  
Our house was built on sand and water and sways in the winter. Making us sick and tired and weary of the sun when it finally does arrive.

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