Fat War

It's always the quiet ones
you have to watch.

It started innocently enough;
a Catholic minister's arch
remark in a parish newsletter,
something about the Buddha having been
'too fat to crucify'.

It was meant to be satire.

When a choirboy found the naked body
the Buddhists claimed
the minister had 'converted'.
A coroner tactfully pointed out his mottled cheeks,
his tombstone pallor,
the fact he wasn't breathing.
'He's meditating,'
the Buddhists said.
The coroner peeled back
one of the minister's eyelids
to reveal a rotten cavity
crawling with fly larvae.
'He's meditating
on the impermanence of life,'
the Buddhists clarified,
almost too quickly.

In the weeks that followed
there were murmurs
of foul play
but, as usual,
sodomites and foreigners copped the brunt.
The Buddhists remained
characteristically silent.

When things began to change,
they were replete with excuses.
The concrete bunkers were 'temples';
the barbed wire represented
humankind's entanglement with material things;
the conning towers at compass points
stood for the Buddha's Four Noble Truths '
Number 1,
life is suffering.
Number 2,
the cause of suffering is
not doing what Buddhists tell you.
Number 3,
any civilian who breaches the fifty foot
exclusion zone around a temple
will be shot.
Number 4,
Buddhism is the bomb.

As for the actual bombs,
(those vast, phallic missiles
that thrust from armoured compound roofs
like fingers
pointing away to the moon)
when challenged
the Buddhists claimed that they
did not exist.
'But we can see them,' said the people.
'Ah,' said the Buddhists
through megaphones,
'but do you exist?'
'Yes,' the people answered.

The Buddhists started shooting.

And it wasn't the sound
of one hand clapping
so much as
the castanet crack
of a billion unbelievers
being bitch-whipped
with prayer beads
and rolled up grass mats.
The Buddhists were dog tired
of their soft reputation;
across every nation
kung fu monks teleported into position,
chanting sutras and smashing
tank-treads with crackling
globes of pure chi fission.
Whole gun-hungry regiments fell
to Drunken Monkey shenanigans
and shineheaded Shaolin Masters
blasted into locked parliaments
with Thousand League Kicks,
cloaked
in the righteous stink of ozone.
The silence left
by the cloth-bound feet
of prowling Buddhist ninjas
was broken only by the snick-snick
of a katana blade
that, like some careless barber,
nicks your throat
and takes off both your ears.
Giant Buddha statues shook loose
the dust of years
and rose like well-lunched golems
to rain rotund doom on iconoclastic vandals,
swatting stinger rockets
like nits,
crunching goats under stone sandals.
Huts, crops, skulls
were all threshed flat
by the wondrous advance of fat rocks.
Boughs burst beneath beneficent boulderesque bellies;
cowed non-Buddhist populations took one glance
at their tellies and
sensibly
switched sides.
Incense burnt in huge pyres;
prostrations increased
almost five hundred percent;
the Buddha statues wept blood
and went paddling
in a goulash of pious vomit.
Weary tears became a rainbowed slick.
The Dharma spread like sick.

Nothing,
however,
lasts forever.
One day
a new breeze blew
through the sandalwood mists.
Fuelled by righteous indignation
a coalition of the other world religions
resolved to strike back
exclaiming
'This is an outrage!'
and, to be fair,
the Buddhist
campaign did smack
of plagiarism.

The comeback was holy as fuck.
Padres called down
lightning bolt airstrikes
that blew legions
of karate kids
to sizzling atoms;
sweaty clerics miracled
suicide bombers back from
bolognesed oblivion
again and again;
when Arnold Schwarzenegger
weighed in for Jesus
packing a pair of
blessed Kalashnikovs
and a holdall bulging
with crushingly apposite one-liners,
the Buddhists were forced
to bring Bruce Lee
out of cold storage.
Knights and ninjas
clanged blades across a rangy battlefield;
in hilltop churches, children
sang hymns while they chambered bullets;
and as shrapnel-knackered soldiers
found God
in the dregs of froth-corrupted lungs
atheists and agnostics looked on
in disbelief.