H e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s b e r g

N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i v e s E d i t i o n

KEVIN HAYES

Designated An Enemy Of The State

designated as an enemy of the state by the powers that be, I was

taken into custody by the police one morning on my way to work &

when I asked the arresting officers what I had done, the only response I

received was their silence, for they ignored my question as if I did not

exist. . .they blindfolded me & took me to the maximum security prison

built to incarcerate & isolate traitors so they could do no social harm, a

prison established in a secret location so that unknown conspirators

could not attack & set the captives free, the blindfold imposed upon me

as a form of psychic torture so I would never know where in the world I

had been imprisoned. . . once we reached the maximum security prison,

I was stripped naked & immediately locked up in a solitary confinement

cell because my captors intended to keep me separated from all contact

suspicious that I would use any association with others to mount a

conspiracy against the order they were born to defend as patriotic

citizens of our nation. . .

my isolation cell was so small I could barely fit inside it &

indeed, my captors indicated that its dimensions had prompted them to

choose it as most suitable to accommodate me because I was a traitor &

therefore, I did not deserve the luxury of enough space to allow any

motion. . . indeed, the solitary confinement cell that surrounded me

forced me to remain standing erect at all times since it did not provide

me with the length or the width necessary to assume another position. . .

besides, my new habitat was so spartan it did not furnish me with a

chair or a bed, a condition my captors no doubt imposed upon me

because they wanted me to become familiar with the subtle torture of

absolute exhaustion, an attitude I inferred when they taunted me with the

advice that I needed to learn how to sleep on my feet. . . besides

depriving me of rest, my captors also deprived me of food & water

providing me only with a rare crust of stale bread or a cup of lukewarm

water when they calculated I would be on the verge of starvation or fatal

dehydration taunting me that my bare subsistence diet was a benefit to

me since my solitary confinement cell lacked a toilet I could use so more

substantial meals would rapidly make the stench intolerable. . . no light

entered into my solitary confinement cell because my captors did not

allow me the benefit of bars immersing me instead in a cage that had

been carved from solid rock, even the door a slab of granite set on

hinges, more like a tomb than a cell, a parallel that was driven home

when my captors referred to me as the breathing dead. . . locked inside of

my solitary confinement cell, I could not measure time & my captors

opened the door so seldom I began to feel as if I had been buried alive

forever, a burial that was not disrupted until the authorities sent orders

that I should be tortured into confessing all the crimes I had committed

against the state, the crimes that justified their designation of me as

traitor. . .

as my captors escorted me to the torture room they had prepared

to host me, they laughed in anticipation of the spectacle I would present

to their eager eyes as they watched me suffer telling me that even an

immediate & complete confession would not escape the pain they

planned to impose upon me since they did not want to waste the effort

they had already put into the preparation of the torture room. . . I

protested that I was innocent & had nothing to confess begging my

captors to take pity upon me because I did not deserve the punishment I

was about to receive, but they told me the authorities would never

believe my claim of innocence & besides, their desire to inflict torture

upon me was a function of their own pleasure & not a function of my

guilt. . . once my captors had brought me to the torture room, they

locked me into a chair that had been equipped with manacles for my

wrists & ankles, manacles that kept me bound in place so tightly I knew

I could not hope to escape the tortures that were to come. . . as my

captors attached a battalion of electrodes across my flesh, I looked

around the torture room & saw that television cameras & monitors had

been set up, a sight that baffled me until my captors told me that the

authorities had ordered my torture & my confession to be broadcast live

to the nation so that all citizens could serve on my hanging jury. . .

as soon as the cameras began rolling, I saw myself exposed

naked on the monitors as one of my captors flipped the switch on the

generator connected to the battalion of electrodes that had been taped to

me sending the first jolt of electricity thru each & every inch of my

body, a jolt that forced me to evacuate the ghosts of piss & shit from my

empty bladder & bowels. . . an interrogator began to question me

demanding that I describe the ways I had betrayed the state, but I

stubbornly remained silent because I knew that no confession I could

invent would prove satisfactory enough to stop the round of torture I had

been condemned to endure certain that nothing I could say or do could

help me to escape any of the pain my captors were determined to impose

upon me. . . I spent days chained to the chair as frequent waves of

electricity flowed thru me, waves I learned to embrace as a fixed

condition of my existence since my captors left me no choice other than

to do so, a torture session that was never interrupted because my captors

worked in shifts so that they could deprive me of sleep, a torture session

that ignited me to howl for my vast television audience until I became so

exhausted I no longer had the strength to howl in response to the shocks

that jolted me to my depths. . .

I endured the hell on earth my captors had prepared for me at the

order of the authorities who had identified me as a traitor to the state for

a solid week when at last the torture ended even though I had never been

broken to confess, both because I was determined to defy all my

accusers & because I had been told my confession would not cause my

torturers to spare me any pain & indeed, I found that the only reason my

routine of electric shock had ended was that the time had come for the

audience to vote me innocent or guilty, a vote they could enter

instantaneously thru their televisions simply by pressing the appropriate

button on their remote controls. . . everyone in the state voted because

the authorities required them to exercise their franchise as free citizens

& when all the votes had been transmitted, no one had voted for my

innocence unanimously determining my guilt instead deciding also that I

should be executed as the penalty for my crime, a verdict that puzzled

me since no specific accusations had ever been made against me & no

evidence had ever been presented to serve as the foundation for the

judgment they had made. . . before my execution could be carried out, a

battalion of one hundred renegades broke into the torture room,

overpowered my captors & liberated me, a sudden redemption I did not

expect since the vote to condemn me had seemed to be unanimous, the

battalion of renegades taking me to the underground refuge they

inhabited, a refuge that could not be penetrated by the power of the state. . .

once the operation designed to rescue me had been successfully

completed, we fortified our sanctuary hidden deep beneath the concrete

streets controlled by the authorities who could only be satisfied if they

received absolute obedience to the iron law they had invented to impose

upon the nation insistent upon the regimentation of all citizens wanting

to dictate every thought & every deed anyone dared to conceive or

execute, whether they were inside our borders or happened to travel

outside. . . because my torture had kept me awake for a solid week, I

could not help but lose consciousness as soon as my saviors carried me

to the bed they kindly provided me when I expressed my need for it & I

slept for several days needing to cure the exhaustion I suffered before I

could gather the strength necessary to ask the questions my experience

of miraculous redemption from imminent execution had raised since the

landslide vote to convict me had seemed to prove that every hand in the

nation was turned against me, a conclusion that the operation to rescue

me showed to be false. . . when I returned to consciousness, I thought at

first that I was a corpse dreaming I was surrounded by the renegades

who had rescued me telling them I could not believe in their existence

because the public had unanimously convicted me & sentenced me to

death so it was not logically possible that they had come to rescue me

from the sentence I had certainly endured. . . the renegades told me that I

was still alive & that they did exist & had rescued me explaining that the

authorities had brainwashed the public determining that the verdict

would be unanimous against me, a verdict they did not participate in

because they were hidden in the underground, in the refuge they had

established so they could escape the control that the authorities sought to

impose upon all citizens. . .

after I was told that the authorities had brainwashed the public so

that everyone would favor my condemnation, I theorized that they must

exercise subtle control over the citizens of our nation in all other areas of

existence since I could not perceive myself as being anything other than

insignificant in the eyes of the state, a suspicion I shared with my

underground comrades who responded by showing me the intelligence

their spies had gathered, copies of government documents that

absolutely confirmed my theory indicating that our officials had been

elected after they had manipulated the minds of the voters, a revelation

that explained why the losing candidates in our elections never received

any votes at all. . . I told the battalion of renegades who had rescued me

that we needed to prepare ourselves to mount a revolution, an act of

rebellion that would certainly be justified since our government did not

rule by the free consent of the governed & therefore it had no valid

claim upon our continued allegiance, a proposition that earned their

universal consent, so we began a strategy session trying to figure out

how we could topple the secret tyrants our intelligence proved the

authorities to be, given that only one hundred citizens had slipped free of

their control mechanisms to find liberation in the underground. . . at

last, we reached the conclusion that we needed to find out how the

government had seized such absolute control over the public mind

hoping that the knowledge would enable us to disrupt the brainwash so

that we could gather the followers necessary to have some chance of

victory, a strategy that required us to send out spies assigned to dig out

the information we needed, a vital mission that had to be successfully

completed if we were to have any chance of liberating citizens who had

been dominated by means so subtle they did not suspect they were

slaves. . .

we decided to send three men up from the underground with the

objective of discovering the means used by the government to impose its

will upon the people & I volunteered to be one of the three because I

wanted to be on the scene when we cracked the mystery, just in case we

found it possible to destroy their ability to brainwash on the spot, an

opportunity to bear witness to history I did not want to miss. . . we

emerged from the underground in the dead of night penetrating all

government offices systematically one by one intent upon finding the

means of mind control that was being exercised by the state searching

thoroughly yet quickly because we wanted to solve the mystery before

dawn eager to destroy the elicit foundation of the state's power, a

destruction that was necessary to clear the way for the revolution that

would set the people free. . . we became exhausted investigating the vast

network of our government, exhausted & frustrated because we did not

find it easy to located the objective we needed to find, but at last, we

stumbled by accident into a storage room in the basement of the building

that housed the offices of our nation's legislators where we found a

machine glowing & humming as it broadcast a subtle pulse spreading

coast to coast, a machine that was conveniently labeled with a sign

identifying it as the national thought control device. . . we had carried

guns with us in case we needed them & now they came in handy as we

pumped bullets into the machine until its glow was extinguished & its

hum ground to a halt just as the sun broke above the horizon gracing our

nation with enough light so that we were able to see the revolution

beginning out in the streets after we walked up the stairs & looked thru a

first floor window. . .

we ran out to join the crowd of rebels we saw discovering that

we did not have to do anything at all to recruit the people to our cause

since, much to our surprise, they turned completely against the

government as soon as we destroyed the mind control machine

demonstrating that their previous allegiance had only been a function of

the pulse that had invaded their heads & now that the pulse was gone,

they realized that they had been brainwashed & they would not rest until

they toppled the authorities responsible & seized the reins of government

themselves. . .as the next step in our revolution, we decided by consensus

that we would mount an attack upon the White House itself with the

intent of deposing our tyrant President, but when we reached the gates

protecting the place, we found its lawn full of citizens who had decided to

support the current administration & I could only infer that these citizens

believed national security to be so much in jeopardy that the

brainwashing machine had not been the only factor in determining their

fervent support for the powers that were & perhaps would continue to be,

an opposition we expected to face since, when we had deliberated our

first revolutionary action at our strategy meeting, we realized that some

of those who had been enslaved by the brain control machine would

choose of their own free will to remain slaves, an opposition that made

our victory in the conflict about to come a matter of some doubt. . .

[Originally published in NHS 2004, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs04/Kevin_Hayes.html.]