G e m i n i

Always do your best to be articulate. We often
career around truth, like cycling past manure.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions – the important
ones like “what is faith?” and “where is truth?”
have never been so celestially integral. If you
find out the answers, don’t boast about it. Saturn
hasn’t aligned just for you. Share an important
moment with someone you otherwise wouldn’t.

Beware the temptation to kiss yourself in a mirror.
Beware wishing wells and umbrellas. Your element
is forlorn. Mercury has some apologising to do.
If someone from your past asks ‘do you remember
that summer?’ know it is a trap, a trap
made of gurgling confessors. Kindness will come
by way of natural phenomena – think underground.
Call me to hear how to avoid yourself.

Your house of dreams and wishes
is magic today, Sadge. Some real impressive
rabbit out of the drain shit. A stranger
will offer you a night on the town,
but what part of town is unclear. Remember –
Mercury Retrograde is not just the name
of your future tattoo shop. The moon will be dim,
so your balcony dinner will suffer. You may call me.

Even if (as some doomy pessimists suspect)
the creator of the universe is a cliché, the cosmos
is not ashamed of its gifts. What can you learn
from this? Don’t dismiss your Venusian disposition.
I ought to add a caveat: something
and nothing are too easily mistaken for each other.
This may be an unusual weekend.
Call. I have great things to tell you.

Don’t deny yourself an ugly space,
even angler fish have hearts in their volcanic bodies.
It would be foolish to turn away the Gods of hatred,
especially as they have made the journey to you.
Get perspective. If you lived on Pluto, your saviour,
your shadow would last for 65 days.
But you wouldn’t be able to breathe, either.
This is a recorded message.

Dear Libra, you did not notice the tree
sprouting again, but you did notice
the leaves. It is never the sharpness of the bend,
it is the speed at which you take it.
I have an astro alert for you:
its time to remove the lid from the box.
Your eyes are like bacteria in petri dishes,
no one can see what you’re thinking.

Something lives in every part of the globe.
This should give you comfort this week,
when a well-known friend, or brother, breaks apart.
If a friend, it’s hot water at bedtime
and only one open window in the house.
If a brother, that’s less clear. What’s obvious is that
you’ll know it when it happens, a key change.
As in music. As in locks.

To give your life gripping excitement
of a pinless grenade, one needs to introduce a deadline.
What haven’t you started? If you were
to plant that magnolia seed now, you’d
need to wait 10 full years to see it bloom.
Is there still time? Request a full, personal
birth chart now. I can’t pinpoint when you came into
the world, rendering this reading useless.

Time to relax that broken head: pull the phone
out the wall, follow its cord through the house,
release dust and let it rest in a friendly way,
follow the phone line outside and, with purpose,
pull it down off the telegraph pole.
Actually today could be busy. Get an early night,
as they draw further away from us.
This number is currently unavailable.

Leave it to you to fall in love with an adversary.
Pleasure and disgust are often in cahoots,
like being enchanted by a blocked pore.
The handsome stranger’s pillow talk
is a hokey lecture. Leave the stranger in the strange land.
‘If everybody had an ocean’ sang The Beach Boys
in ‘Surfin’ USA’. Your outlook is money,
love and ocean. Don’t forget your cossie.

Today every move you make is a kiss
and everyone is on fire. Take precaution.
Don’t walk over three drains unless you have to.
Remember, if you are listening to this,
then no one is strange or perfect. It’s time to begin
something new. Imagine yourself as the house
you grew up in, suddenly this unfamiliar room
appears and the light begins to open.

Roses are blooming in your garden, Gemini,
but still your heart is an investment piece
you’re ‘saving for best’. Hello dustbag.
Yet again you look to me to provide
the answers. I do not have them. Remember
what Violet wrote to Vita: ‘I remain for a long time
leaning on the balustrade with dreaming eyes’.
Its time to wake up. Never call me again.

Alex MacDonald lives in London. His poetry has been published in Poetry London, Poetry Wales, 3:AM Magazine, The Quietus and Clinic. He is one of the editors of Poems In Which.

Amy‘s collection Luxe (Salt) was published in 2013. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales and elsewhere. She co-edits Poems in Which and is editor of Best Friends Forever (The Emma Press) – an anthology of poems on women’s friendships.