The British handed smallpox blankets to the Lenape in seventeen sixty-three
Amherst wrote the order in a letter that survived him
Disease as policy — contagion as a weapon of the crown
The bodies were the battlefield — the dying was the winning
The Tuskegee men were told they were receiving treatment
Four hundred men with syphilis observed but never cured
Forty years of government physicians watching the progression
While penicillin sat in every pharmacy — assured
The radiation experiments on prisoners and the mentally ill
The Army spraying zinc cadmium sulfide over Saint Louis
The CIA's aerosol tests above the streets of San Francisco
The bodies of the governed offered up without a promise
Marbas knows both sides of every illness — who released it
And who was handed something meant to look like help
He takes the shape of a lion — sovereign, carnivorous, patient
He has seen every cure withheld and every harm dealt
The body is the territory they have always wanted
The diagnosis is the instrument of power refined
Marbas holds the lion's key to what afflicts and heals you
The disease and the cure were never two different kinds
Who profits when you're sick?
Who loses when you're well?
The shape that enters as your healer
Is the same shape that casts the
Purdue Pharma funded studies that called OxyContin non-addictive
The FDA reviewer who approved it went to work for Purdue six months later
Five hundred thousand deaths across two decades of the opioid harvest
And the Sackler family gave the art museums their name in gratitude
The tobacco industry ran forty years of manufactured science
Paying researchers to create uncertainty where certainty was clear
They called it balance — called it academic freedom
While the actuaries quietly counted every year
Pharmaceutical patents lock the generic cure behind a wall
Insulin costs three hundred dollars where it once cost next to nothing
The patient is a revenue stream first and then a human being
And the hospitals are run by men who never learned the Hippocratic something
Marbas changes shapes — and so does the affliction
Yesterday it was the plague, today it is the pill
The lion underneath the healer's coat is always hungry
And the body of the governed is a territory still
Purdue Pharma funded studies that called OxyContin non-addictive
The FDA reviewer who approved it went to work for Purdue six months later
Five hundred thousand deaths across two decades of the opioid harvest
And the Sackler family gave the art museums their name in gratitude
The tobacco industry ran forty years of manufactured science
Paying researchers to create uncertainty where certainty was clear
They called it balance — called it academic freedom
While the actuaries quietly counted every year
Pharmaceutical patents lock the generic cure behind a wall
Insulin costs three hundred dollars where it once cost next to nothing
The patient is a revenue stream first and then a human being
And the hospitals are run by men who never learn
TheSeventhKey_77
