Uncategorized02 May 2021 03:58 pm
heraldic symbol for Weilbach in Austria

Deborah L. Davitt


When you go to South America
and drop a lot of money
for an authentic
spiritual cleanse
and try to ignore the locals
laughing at the tourists
who’re here for an
ayahuasca high colonic
to the brainstem;
 
when you’ve swallowed
herbal purgatives and laxatives
(herbal and organic
are always better,
don’t you know?),
and have crouched, quaking,
on a toilet,
vomiting into a bucket,
while your intestines clarify
at both ends;
 
when you’ve done all these things,
in search of a sacred,
transcendent moment
of oneness with the universe,
it’s probably not a wonder,
that everyone’s spirit-animal
turns out to be impressive;
everyone’s always guided
by something fierce—
tigers and lions and bears,
oh my—
 
because when you’ve dropped
several thousand dollars
for the privilege of
feeling like you have the flu
for six hours,
no one wants to know
that their spirit-animal is a snail,
that the guiding energy in their lives
is that of a hermit crab,
and it’s hard to dress up
a jellyfish as the ultimate predator
that it is, when
most people think of them
as a synonym for spineless.
 
So, mysteriously, there’s a world
full of people out there,
with fierce and prideful totems
stalking through the universe
at their sides,
when statistically speaking,
at least ninety percent of eight billion people,
should actually be deer,
or llamas,
or the occasional inoffensive squirrel.
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One Response to “Totems”

  1. on 07 Jun 2021 at 6:57 am SFPA May 2021 Round-Up – SPECPO

    […] poem, spec, “Totems,” Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts, May 2, 2021. http://www.polutexni.com/?p=10788 […]

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