Lotus
OH BEDIZENED ONE!
I beg your pardon, it’s bleeping LOTUS
This first December issue of Lotus finds you sitting in cross-legged position praying for the rainy, zany season of the muses. No excuses, this time Ye Olde Poetry Factory will crank out a dozen odes of the chosen in hopes that you like our flash and dash. T’is a beautiful day in winter, when the lotus pads have turned Xerox grey, and the slipshod alphabet with its roaming curves might take your pencil for a dip in the poetry lane where all the left-handed dreams the midnight crowd come true. Unleash and unleash. Spigot to the speak. Violet streak. It was only yesterday that the late Allen Ginsberg was lying on a lotus like a purple fern in China, contemplating happy zeroes, and questing his desire. If not for the sheer ecstasy of the senses, then for the profundity of the darker mind, the flip side of the coin. Bones marred by desperation, lousy planets still turning in a misty ocean of oceans.
Whether you are reading Lotus in the halcyon reaches of winter, or in the laughing waves of autumn, you may witness the spiritual war against lycra and hypocrisy. Paeans to wonder bras and strange doublespeaks in the night, absolut vodka and Cinderella tokens of a kinder ecstasy, dubloons of feather gold.
It was getting kind of old in the dens of Starbucks, where the fluted red screens of Powerbooks floated impossible poetry dimmed to a green tint of crest, where stains and shamrock unison make shy poetry a thing of the past. Why not write faster, and braver, I thought to myself, downing my second cup of ice coffee, and bending my legs into a form of higher yogic energy. The clock was smiling and I could hear Neruda’s wristwatch ticking out there.
If these are not the best days, then what are? As the New Year draws near, it’s a hilarious day in California where all the banshee women and the frail-voiced poets are getting the better word, for the thought of a snowflake in the air. Like Beijing poppies that have found their way onto syncretic paper, Lotus flies free from the mumps and leaves you a sigma of joy like black lightning in the crow-colored sky.
Salutations,
Carrie Chang, editor