Mars Retrograde Musings / by grace mcgrade

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It’s too hot in California this weekend, and the air feels burnt and stale. I can feel the reprieve of the trees, invisible groans that swallow the city in a low humming. The humidity a kind of muggy hot that makes you feel swollen all over, like sticky spoiled peaches. I wake up paralyzed and suspended mid air, exalted in pondering. Engulfed in a heated blanket of uninvited thoughts.

For me to take a walk would be dangerous, but I am doing it anyway, because I’m angry and I’m hurt. And you say I’m scary when I’m mad, so I’m blowing off my steam, letting it meld and twist into the smokey air.  I’m scared the thoughts I have of you get plucked up by celestial broadcasting towers and add static to the cord, cloud the airwaves. Further impress upon the dark electricity. 

I think about how the men have been mutating, how almost all of the warriors are gone, engorged by different propped up 2D screens, entertained into the apocalypse. Our fathers and brothers and sons serving a bottomless void of artifice, masturbating to the plummet of the earth, void of any battle.  Like numb obedient puppets, sedated. Drooling, pants down, on the conveyor belt toward the demise of the planet. 

 Forcibly leaning towards things that are artificial, simulations of things that aren’t quite the thing ,but a distorted-fun house-mirror of the thing that they are seeking. 

I’m in a defeated limbo of “what ifs”, my favorite dark game, where I let my mind wander down untouched probabilities and avenues unexplored. And I’m here, and your there, and I don’t know if I made the right choice. Maybe I am cursed with longing, with these elaborate ideas that I am always just barely out of reach of something much better for me. It's the longing that is the problem rather than the circumstance. Always daydreaming about things, stretching myself psychically. This is when the witch thing gets problematic, the kind of accidental magic that will procure an inevitable run in with a timeline I’ve built in my head. I gave up on finding a lover for purposes of longevity and security, and instead picked those with soul, lovers from alternate dimensions, whose worldview perplexed and confused me, married me to new perceptions, for however brief. Is that so selfish? 

How do you tear yourself away from someone else’s cells when you are bound together like a stiff watch, barely moving an increment apart, incapable of deciphering what feelings are yours. When you share dreams and speak in your sleep, when no conversation in your head is solitary. How do you pull the war out of a man? Can you unravel war with your thighs and your breath? Can you initiate a man without him knowing?

I’m afraid of the thoughts I have of you, you trickster spirit, full of plot twists guarded by those perpetually dilated eyes. I’m afraid you can feel them. For so long I need to hear you say it, to give us the credit, to feel you put your trust in me. There is satisfaction beyond the clinking of poker chips and ice hitting a whisky sour. Get off the conveyor belt of impulsed action, get the fuck off and smell the roses. 

We are divine and pure and real, as real as honeysuckle air, alien invasions, jittery stars, songs about longing, gnomes, two hands that feel the same, indigo dragonflies, captured frogs, waterfalls and and spaceships, and tell me everything kisses.

But then you abuse yourself and you contaminate the slither of soul I left inside of you.

Extract your own poison, build a better war. This one is tired.