Lotus Gait

(album: Failed States - 2012)

I have this recurring nightmare:
Flailing pigeon, her broken feet
Frozen solid to the freezing pavement.
I turn away as if I do not see.
I have this childhood memory
Of my old man screaming from the driver's seat
To turn away from an unfolding horror,
But he could not undo what I had seen.
We never spoke of it again.
Two more hapless citizens of

The new post-traumatic stress worldwide disorder.
A stockholm syndrome fifth estate,
Desperate to batten down the mounting horrors
And shuffle on in a global lotus gait.

Content to marinate in the plasma glow of the
Home entertainment prisons we
Commune before like dime-store shrines.
Are these but votive lives?
It's a strangled, twisted truss
That shores-up each of us.
Anything to dull the pain
Of a splintered lotus gait.

As for me a filigree of psychic police tape
Tends to cordon-off the darker scenes.
But the wandering mind stumbles through it
And relives them all eventually.

Pries open wide your eyes and shines a painful light
On the guilt, the fear, the shame.
The courage never came
From the plasma glow of the
Home entertainment prisons we
Cling to like dime-store shrines.
Are these but votive lives?
Conservative at heart.
A conformist from the start.
A stockholm syndrome fifth estate.
A staggering lotus gait.
It's a strangled, twisted truss
That shores-up each of us.
Anything to dull the pain
Of a self-inflicted, crippling lotus gait.