YOU'RE SITTING FULL LOTUS

YOU’RE SITTING FULL LOTUS

 

You’re sitting full-lotus in the middle of an asylum floor with a straitjacket on and duct-tape over your mouth and six kinds of meds working like Merlin and Morgana La Fey over a cauldron on the nightshift of your gut to turn you back into a princess and you’re trying to convince me that the world hasn’t gone mad.

 

I say you can put hatred in a suit and prop it up in front of a tv camera and it will still reek drool and fester as it always does. I won’t say it’s the end of Western civilization. There are enough chicken-littles running around like Nostradamus and the Mayan calendar for that. Civilization’s the kind of karma that arises from the ground of everything it walks on like other people. Whether you’re an Iraqi or an Aztec. Sunni Shia or Mexican drug cartel. Your head’s off. Civilization’s a serial killer that covers its tracks with an endless internal investigation it’s always doing on itself like an autopsy to see what went forensically wrong. And the one enduring cornerstone of hell that it keeps being rebuilt on is the fact that it never comes to an end. It looks to the future like a prophetic skull.

 

You can organize rabies into a political party and run xenophobic mutants for candidates and encourage your hatred to speak up in front of a lonely daffodil of a microphone on an elevated platform overlooking the crowd that’s as anxious as a church to get on with burning the Koran. Savanorola in Medicean Florence cooking in the Bonfire of the Vanities he lit to burn the Renaissance like a painting by Botticelli in the righteous wrath of a God without an eye for beauty. The fanatical apocalyptic Puritans who were driven out of England by the restoration to burn women’s bodies in Salem are trying to start a new crusade with the Saracens to bleed people like meat until they’re either kosher or halal just the way God likes his tenderloins done well. It’s a pity we ever gave up worshipping the moon. You couldn’t stand up in the streets of the Jerusalem of 1094 without slipping on the blood and the gore of those slaughtered by wardogs ravening like Christians in God’s Holy Abbatoir. Humans justify themselves to God with acts of ineffable carnage. God keeps his distance to avoid the smell of us on his breath. The moon sheds its skin like a Pythian priestess quoting scripture from a snakepit. The moon took one look and the Medusa turned to stone. Her eyes froze like holy water in an ice age when she learned what we had learned to do with fire rock and bone.

 

Now every kind of hominid’s got an opinion of its own it cherishes like a golden maggot it swears is going to turn into a butterfly if it can wrap itself up in the flag like the corpse of a worm in a chrysalis of cash. Adulterous polyglots of power espousing murderous family values get caught going down on a hooker like a rich man’s brat as their poor long-suffering apologetic wives stand beside them when the shit hits the camera feeling as if their womanhood had just been turned into some kind of backroom political uncle. Twenty-five million children dying a year on the planet from starvation and the news of the day is where this pathetic hypocrite sticks his dick. The real politik of a sleazy hick. The same dung in the corner of the yard under the acid snow of the righteous the crocuses bloom in like the gynophobic cardinals of sin who like to fuck children at confession. Diocese after diocese. Suffer the little children to come unto me like pages in the White House or a male escort service on Craigslist. The ferocious impotence of purity sacrifices the innocence of our children to the homicidally obscene telling them they’ll be forgiven for the original sin of Eve if only they’ve got the stomach to believe everyone’s rotten to begin with. The spitting cobras of the Taliban splash acid in a schoolgirl’s eyes like the writing on the wall she was learning to read. They did the same in Salem. They burned women. They shared the same death-wish.

 

And the Inquisition’s on the way to root out the weeds from the flowers of the flesh as if a true holy life weren’t the conversion of heaven to what’s earthly about us but a kind of psycopathic espionage conducted by diddlers and ideologues who look at things like terrorists who delight in the divine meaning of their work. The accusation takes the tail of the confession in its mouth and things are balanced out eternally like a perpetual motion machine that’s gone green. But it’s neither crucial nor irrelevant that you understand this. The new memes of spiritual life have perfected the aim of our old genetic evolution in a game of hit and miss and the angels are bungi jumping from paradise like black ops hashashim with a hit list sliding down from gunship helicopters like commas and caterpillars. Corruption insists on the crystalline structure of perfection. We’re looking through a dark glass digitally to see if there’s anything virtuous about virtual reality. Wolves with shepherd’s crooks. Surrealistic blobs of life pouring honey over our heads like Dalfiesque gobs of time over the latest war-crime. Blood washed off with blood. The angels keep their ancient places. Turn but a stone and start a wing. But two world wars and and the surfeited indifference of glutted spiders to the flies that have the guts to be the last to look into the eyes of the countless genocides that hang from the trophy-lines of our dreamcatching webs and the larks aren’t singing anymore. And even Babylon is appalled by the Whore that makes quick work of the world like a sexually transmitted infection that gives immunity to anyone who isn’t wearing a condom but takes things on faith that it will later blame on love. The polyglot evangels of a humanistic vision  are the impossible knots in the heartwood of the tongue-tied. Freedom of speech isn’t a choice. It’s a decision. Three monkeys and they’ve all got their fingers up to their lips like the streetgangs of L.A. Revolution advances its chances of a takeover by storming the lottery that made the occasional poor man rich by selling hope to the people like the odd man out with three strikes against him even before he takes his first swing trying out for a baseball team like a chunk of coal with the manifest destiny of the diamond that cuts him from the roster like an unwanted part. The eyelids of the roses are covered in worms. Religion’s a hail mary pass in the playbook of God trying to win a place on the cheerleading squad before the two minute warning of the last quarter. Life’s a wonderful wife coming to terms with her disappointment like something Cambrian in the Burgess Shales that came to a dead end. The morning star goes down like Venus on Franz Kafka under the golden apples of the Hesperides and wakes up shining sublimely like Lucifer exalting in the heresies that have ignited the fires of his eventual martyrdom. God may be dead. But hell marches on like a cliche of time that ignores the fact that it too is the dead metaphor of an enlightened superstition that crept like the shadows of monsters under the door of our childhood delusion. The dead are legislating for the living. They shed us like old taboos of skin to dance nude in the moonlight free of the club-footed bodies that clung to them like wallflowers of dust that were never asked because they weren’t very beautiful. And do not want to be reborn as us. To see clearly in the twenty-first century is just another way of distorting the madness. Eyes have evolved into warped mirrors in a house of horrors up close and intimate as a finger on the trigger of the G-spot of the orgasmic atrocities that keep playing Russian roulette with everyone on the planet as if the gun wasn’t as fully loaded as a casino on a run of bad luck. Who gives a fuck gets said like a new novina in the mouth of an insincere cynic and everyone’s doing unto others before it gets done unto them. And something calling itself love is looking for a loyal hooker like a Virgin Mary Magdalene who matriculated from an immaculate conception like a Catholic girl at a private school that teachs up to date creationism like the divine agenda behind the evil of evolution that led to us just as we are here today at the top of the foodchain trying hard not to look down like the only way left to go.

 

A great night sea of madness and you’re on a little raft of sanity you’ve patched together like the punchline of an old joke to get to the other side of your homelessness. You’re a window that lies to itself about what it sees. You sit by your mirrors and wait for high tide to rise like the moon. You speak of providence. And then you drown. You let go of your sanity as if your madness were the only thing left you had to hang on to. You close your eyes and think you’re walking on the dark side. And I haven’t got the heart to tell you that even your madness will turn out to be just another old friend who forgot all about you. It’s that empty there’s nothing to it. Not a star. Not an eye. Not a firefly. Not a bolt of lightning can see through it. Parts of God she left out of the creation of the world. Faces she turned away from herself like the wind in the orchard scattering the blossoms of those she turned down. By their fruits ye shall know them. And yours are the dark abundance of this sudden windfall all over the ground as if you’d finally given in to gravity and let go of the solar system. I can read your thoughts like lines on the palms of your hands. You see a starmap of dead ends in an obsolete zodiac. I see water on Mars and the moon flowing like rivers that bear your name like the very first to see them. And it’s kind of funny to think about an explorer who’s worried about getting lost on her way into the unknown without directions. Like a star that doesn’t know where one constellation ends and another begins until someone looks at it from the inside. The way the sea keeps an eye on the weather. And the moon keeps winking.

 

PATRICK WHITE