In Response to "Lotus Flower" by Radiohead

I.
It is about our own absurdity, our inadequacy at times to embody the vastness of our own humanity. How every beautiful thing is there, present, in the stillness of our being, and yet we move spasmodically around it, apoplectic in our need, in our strangeness. How we know the beauty we could manifest, crave it deeply, and are aware all the time of the distances we impose between ourselves and its realization. Oh--we are so hungry, we are so strange, even to ourselves. Especially to ourselves. We weep in frustration, tear at our hair and turn away. Send a cold stare in the place of our brokenness, nurse our brittle hearts in private.

II.
It is about how we bind ourselves and find we cannot live within such confines. How we spasm and knock ourselves against such walls only to erect them again in our consciousness. In our sleep. In our waking dreams we turn and jut and scramble and tip, only to find ourselves again in darkness. In light. Are the external variables so important really? Do they define anything beyond the stage upon which we are set to enact all the scenes between birth and death? To live it all before the fall of the curtain, heavy and musty with time. Oh, if I could only relieve your sadness. I'd kiss each eyelid, long and slow. Rock you to sleep like an infant in my birdlike arms.

III.
He jigs, he ambles, he props himself on air and moves spasmodically against the thing that pushes in on him from all sides. Threatens to crush him. He closes his eyes in the ecstasy, the torment, the sweetness of singing it away from the body, but it comes again with a force. It yanks him away from his solace, away from the quiet of his own jagged breath. He feels hunted, but he does not pity himself. Instead he is interested in his demise. In his absurd helplessness. In the irony of knowing oneself as a lotus blossom and being incapable of blooming into its beauty. Complexity is a given, but that beauty, that delicate wholeness. It eludes him again. Darkness pierces him: man on a stick. Not moon but man. Not stillness but apoplexy. Not here but there. Always far away and as if struggling against the weight of the entire ocean.