MKUltra: The File Went Black

Fluorescent hum

The chart gets signed

Subject forty-seven

Decline to kind

White coats circle, pens in hand

Documenting what they've planned

Count backwards from a hundred, please

While we dissolve your memories

Sign here, here, and here again—

You volunteered. You can't remember when

The room smells clean, the straps feel tight

They dims the bulbs and kill the light

Twist the dial, observe, record

Another mind for the greater good

MK ultra—I don't know my name

Every mirror shows a different frame

Shock the self until it splits

Reassemble from the counterfeit

MK ultra—was I always this?

Something's missing that I shouldn't miss

Someone else speaks through my mouth

I watch myself from somewhere south

Was that my childhood or a film?

Did I have a sister? What's her name?

I remember water, I remember cold

I remember being six years old—

Or maybe that's the photograph

They showed me till I felt it back

My mother's voice sounds like a tape

Rewound, degraded, losing shape

Note the subject's absent stare

Increase the dosage, document with care

MK ultra—I don't know my name

Every mirror shows a different frame

Shock the self until it splits

Reassemble from the counterfeit

MK ultra—was I always this?

Something's missing that I shouldn't miss

Someone else speaks through my mouth

I watch myself from somewhere south

They played a voice, said it was mine

Asked me to repeat each line

By the fifteenth take I believed the words

Sang confessions I'd never heard

Now every thought feels secondhand

Rehearsed by someone else's hand

I smile on cue, I flinch on cue—

I'm fluent in a tongue I never knew

Fuck your files, fuck your grants

Fuck your academic chants