Above: Mercury, little angry god. A celestial error rehearsing itself. Below, mercury rising, liquid death answering the call. Amid, my body hangs in phase-lag between heavy need and aftermath. Desire overtakes instruction. Every intention: distorted.

The stars call it precession. But it’s the mathematics of hunger. My chemistry backspins hard enough to register that I’m about to fall. Retrograde choke-holds me: push/pull, aphelion/perihelion, a body covered in stardust and made a plaything of physics.

I’m spreading for the whole universe as an act of pure invitation, a flare announcing I will take any touch, any body, any collision that interrupts this escalating drift. Ecstasy sharpened by panic: wanting everyone, knowing none can hold me, offering myself to a cosmos that only widens my motion. But why I am giving myself to a system that only throws me around?

Because I’ve lost my moon.

“This is not the time” insists the orbit. “It has to be” says the pulse between my thighs, opening me wider than reasonable. If I slip, my lungs baptize in liquid metal. If I hold, the pressure of a galaxy crushes me like a star attempting form. Both outcomes are catastrophic, both are beautiful.

I hold to a planetary wedding ring, thinning under stress, last fixed coordinate I remember. 

My grip fractures from a blistered hand. What keeps me here is the raw mechanics of not wanting to rise or fall alone. I am starving for connection in a sky that offers debris instead of direction. I widen further, beg for impact. An acrobat of relapse, dangling between pleasure and despair, a suspended equation, desperate for something to steady me. Searching for a hand, a body, a presence that can ground this riot of (e)motion.

Mercury above. Mercury below. Mercury’s in retrograde. and I cannot let go.

Someone, break this oscillation. Take me down before I eclipse. I’m stuck dancing naked in the sky, in perfect athletics between lethal cosmic masses, tearing my center apart. Drifted too far from my moon to pull me back.

Mercury’s in retrograde and I am one slip away from burning the whole damn zodiac down

just to feel wanted.