Uncategorized02 May 2021 03:58 pm
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.
One Response to “Totems”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
[…] poem, spec, “Totems,” Polu Texni: A Magazine of Many Arts, May 2, 2021. http://www.polutexni.com/?p=10788 […]