Three conjunction lyrics, 4/2022
Neptune & Jupiter in an increment
of their mass & gravitation
over a 165-year cycle
become superposed
in the peculiar perspective of earth's
geo-metric
biosphere noosphere
directing
to 3° above the horizon
as the respective trajectories seem
suspended in hologramic
flickerings weighing
on personal interpretations
& moods here,
conjuring
of all things visitations
from an old skipper
& a childhood friend's
sailor-mother
her domestic valor dredged up,
bless them Nausicaa, there
washing clothes by the sea
under the rupturing thunder,
'the Cloudgatherer'
fading into distant lightning
his retinue
guarded by badass Cerberus
teeth flashing like censers
swung in orthodox candlelight
of fuming obsequies
through non-linearities of fission,
where 'the good Cheiron'
survives in camouflage
as ancestral contacts
that wasted away in bodycounts
return in every conjunctive
truce
While planets pause
like massive authoritarian orbs
influencing endless
entangled jurisdictions,
brothers actually,
as not-so-localized ceasefires
secretly inform
events & routines
& mutate people's emotions
what's owed
to magnitudes
shrunk into point-like quanta
in the night
growing mooned
or moonless
as horoscopes tremble?
obituaries breathing utopian theories
harden & soften hearts amused
by heat death
money & technology like 2 grotesque ships
patrol continuously in the night
held captive by ideologies of life,
midwives wait to receive
fresh infant dependencies
the differences being so small
& the system not
seeming to accelerate,
was it entropy
gravity or
unexcelled did they soon
change into each other?
An attractor could be an asteroid
or a bardo harmless or edifying,
or an anima's return, a native
present from birth
flashing her breasts in a dream
in part-ownership
of the theater of war
& any subsequent judgement
of its violence,
before disappearing
she the Resistance, the Lover,
at sunrise into
the liver
of the enemy,
ignorance
land & earth,
dialectics, brainstorms,
Mahayana of the bank account?
a silent observer
a character now
'the Charioteer'
Auriga up there you see
in these terms, were you drafted
into it? which corps, medical? cavalier?
or deferred by Krishna, Kali?
jokes the wind, the whatchama frontal
cortex localizing yokelizing
none of it, no, if not all
of it
a spider rappels
from the lamp,
trapped in a smudged jar
dumped outside on the ground like
Satan, freed
from the brain & nightmares
of my your we
won't go into it, the smells, the soul
went into it, a questioning
witness
under pressure
not always debriefable,
clamming up
could be transformative,
but what are you
doing with that ghastly ?
aiming at the brother's ?
in the imponderable
moment-inducing
ghostly infinity
Dave Shortt is a long-time writer from the USA whose work has appeared over the years in a number of online and print literary-type venues, including Uut Poetry, Sulfur, and the print anthology Octo-Emanations. More of his poems can be found in recent or upcoming issues of Clockwise Cat and Carmina Magazine. Dave recommends Room to Read.