Horoscopapillon
Spring 1998
Providence

Cycle 1: the JGs.

Zebrus: You will see the world in black and white. Take a photography course! Your moral and artistic senses merge as Venus descends.

Snakittarius: You were born under a BAD MOON, but this month the stars conjoin in your favor. Snack frequently, fulsomely. But talk with your mouth full.

The Rat: Your chief virtues are death and scavenging. Your chief defects are bad vision and good luck.

Buckrogers: Beware of showers in which no one has plastered loose hairs to the wall. But do not stay dry and stinky, or headhunting horsemen will find you. If you keep to the sidewalk, you will find what you need.

 

Bucky slides along the sidewalk. He is dirty. By the time he gets home, Vanna will be done in the bath & her stringy black hair will be looped over the edges; Zeb will have finished photographing the two. Zeb does not like to take pictures of Vanna, but only the tub and her hair on the edge. Bucky presses his ear to the ground, listening for the patter crack of hooves; cringes at the thought of knives on his neck. He fears that Vanna will have cleaned the tub by the time he gets home and that the rats will find him dead there and bit his head which fits in quite well with their moral code. And he fears that Vanna will have her mouth full of birthday cupcake nd be unable to ask for a warrant. He listens again, sniffs his own armpits. The rats with their Cokebottle eyes appear over the hill. The gutter, acting in collusion against the four-eyed, takes on the colors of Bucky, and Bucky slides in.

 

Cycle 2: the RZ’s.

The Rabbit: Let down your hair and have a wild time this weekend. You tend to want to retreat into your den … but beware! - on Saturday night you may find an assassin hiding behind your TV.

Insignificus: Nobody will talk to you, but you will listen. You will creep downstairs and press your breasts to the hot water heater. Thereafter, every window you encounter will look through you to preempt your glance.

Obert: You will receive good advice - that "everybody needs to sing pop tunes transposed into Aeolian mode at least twice a month." Do not forget to "get on the bus." Otherwise, it will remember town after you, singing.

The Snake: Your chief virtues are tightness and versatility. Don’t trust your instincts yet, you slime-born reptile. Hand out free milkshakes to shake things up.

Bogus Bonus: Only four versions of the same song will live in your memory. They will collaborate and make milkshakes for missing army troupes. A trusted instinct will forget it belonged to you. It will make a fortune by winning away and throwing glances at the sky. The TV assassin will assassinate it. And you will fake your place on the TV, running out of advice. Nobody will talk to you, but you will listen.

 

Cycle 3: the KA’s.

Oreo: You’re a smart cookie, but careful because today might be the day the crummy crunchers come marching home. If you gamble, buy yourself 7 lottery tickets today.

Liberian: Avoid horses and women today. Smuggle things in twos.

URSA: Keep your eyes on the road ahead - you never know what treasure you’ll find glittering in the mud. The sticky thing in your fingers turns out to be someone else’s serenity.

Pisces: O, water nymphet, today you find your element: put your finger into the pot of honey. Undertongue will recoil from its startlingly mustard edge. Then you will be slick.

I could avoid the women but not the horses. I bought 7 lottery tickets and stuck my fingers in the pot of honey - yes my lucky stars were rising. Stole some serenity dropped in the road and stretched out into my rodeo future. Some people believe in rhythm, but I believe in cliches: my life has turned around before on the drop of a dime. Remember the evening we spent together? That was seriously natural, even if you just did it because your horoscope told you to. But for me, it was flesh and blood, I’m not afraid to tell you.

Anyway, cowgirl, I’m back in town, and there’s nobody I’d look up before talking to you. We’ll go out and pick up the kind of girl who picks up the check, fake excitement about your brother’s pool table dip into the skinny when everybody else gone to sleep. You’re my favorite control freak, and I’m ready to make everything up to you. Hope the crunchers don’t march home just yet. First I need to smuggle things int(w)os. Smuggle two of you, into twin place, rest both of you somewhere. There could be two summers, my Gemini, my sweet split. How often do cowgirls come home? Not in a dry season, only in the wet. When the stars align, then cross, like Romeo and Juliet, when they put in the railways and wire fences, box you into your brother’s pool able and a midnight swim. Time for one of us to come home. The moon pushes the feet. I buy 7 lottery tickets and call a cab. Going back into town on a cosmic suggestion.

 

Cycle 4: the AT’s (a missing link)

After getting something caught in your eye, you’ll send your regards to some bastard. He tries to toast them, but Orion protects you. An excellent week for okra.

The boar: Your chief virtues are bristling and charging. Your most dangerous liabilities - a certain inflexibility in dealing with others, and a tendency not to trust your abilities.

 

Someone you haven’t seen in many years will reappear in your life this week. Avoid the wiles of an old lover. Bright sun makes your tan lines disappear.

(Orion)

POLLO: Be careful of making baked goods when the moon is full. Otherwise, life continues merrily. If you give away your quarters, you will have clean clothes.

 

Cycle 5: the Rebirth

Silkicorn: If you find a piece of gum in its wrapper, chew it. If you feel a tickle under your seat, catch it.

The Wheel: In anticipation of the belated response to your last birthday, you’ll gather crowds around you and sing belated hymns for the dead. You will be reborn on Tuesday.

Carthaginian: Beware Salammbo and her threat to the Tunisian veil! Hop into bed with your best friend.

CANCER: Your recovery from a serious loss will continue slowly but steadily. Vindications with vindaloo sauce.

 

Monday night was like death. Football on the radio, long distance free but nobody to call. Roommate found out his mother was an auditor, and all the hours he’d been clocking, wages he’d been docking, were but shadow puppetry behind translucent scrim - RRRIP! So dinner alone at Shambala. Frowsy bird of paradise clicking in her open cage, a marsupial scurries under your seat. You love the free pompadons - another basket, please. In walks Mama Warbucks. Typically, she doesn’t recognize you - or if she does remands her customary salute. Greetings in escrow, you ruminate over suitable recompense! Does "roommate," by virtue of having shared persian rug and waffle iron (both repossessed), make a mate? Whether or no, a Karmic Katydid would seem to be in order, solely for sake of the fortuitous convergence. Besides, he let you bend an ear to midnight rantings over unrequited eavesdropping, voyeurism, obsession with a stalker whose hung having abruptly turned to new prey, was stunted. The proprietor still hasn’t brought you your bidis, so you raise a fingerbowl above your head and teeter on top of the table, breaking into an overdue chorus: Los pecados castigados en Jesus. When all the diners are at your feet, kneeling, keening, weeping, you dash the reservoir of red-hot condiment in the eyes of the double-dealing grand dame. Dreamy squeals, visions of Odysseus, a matronly Agamemnon clawing at her sockets.

You sit, dangle a hand to carpeted earth, and snitch a stick of Wrigley’s from the opossom’s pouch. Doublemint. Delicious.

Tuesday dawns with a mate in your room and the gum still hasn’t lost its flavor.

 

Cycle 6: the JE’s.

Cockatoo: Tear this page; keep a secret. Remember to cultivate your mating dance. Remind it to cultivate your secret.

The dragon: Your chief virtues are greed and an aesthetic sense. Your liabilities: a fierce temper and mercurial moods.

Today you will see a baby and it will laugh at you. Tomorrow you will give that laugh to your living room furniture; it will arrange for its future. A prophylactic future is available to the careful planner.

Laughing Tiger: When love is an empty bottle it’s still possible to make a smash. The floor will accept all broken things for you, allowing an entry to some other love. It is wise though, to wear strong shoes. They will protect your feet and injure the loins of l’amour.

At the morality zoo, we go to watch the tempers fight. They are greedy like dragons and lash out with their mercury. Strolling past the laughing tiger, I see a baby laughing like my furniture does after hours. I wonder what the joke is or if it is a merciless, mocking laugh. Does this mean that my living room is another courtroom for puritanism? I replace the lightbulbs, as they may be illuminating my secrets.

In the garden I am planting the lightbulbs. The memories of my secrets will grow out of each one like a cockatoo. Each bird carries a message in its cloacum. It gives it up in museums. The baby outside the lewdness cage is made of condyms. It has finished its "wet-n-go" bottle and flings its skull at me. I grab the wrong parts and my thumb penetrates the point where the cranium has not fused. It is impossible to enjoy the sensation. The floor caves in in sympathetic pain, and the fall allows me to pray. I kick myself in the head for never having reproduced. All that will save the zoo is a headless clone raised for organ donation. The debris provides a recycled zoo where new hybrids, part furniture/part animal, will be born. Thus I am rearranged.

 

Cycle 7: the LM’s.

Scorpio: You have no luck, good or bad. For better or worse, you will stop to think about shoelaces. And then you will continue walking.

Two Moons: There’s someone who would like to open your eyes, but it may be to an irrelevant circumstance. Your eyes will then greet someone worth some other circumstance (asking you to be a martyr for a lost cause. Buy in bulk.

Capricorn: Today is a creamy day. Still, Capricorn should avoid butter on his search for loose women. Good fortunes abound as Mars ascends.

Sign = the Double-Breasted Suit: You’ll participate in a conspiracy against your own home. This will be your answer to everyone that has ever fucked with the arrangement of your furniture. Happily, those sanitation workers won’t interfere.

Two moons and the double-breasted suit secure their love, at last.

Two moons: Listen to what happened today. Today I looked around me for my ideal counterpart, as I was in Big Y picking up orange juice and money. I like getting money at the supermarket better than the bank, actually. I was struck with a momentary sensation that someone in the store was going to walk up to me and tell me to tell them what I was thinking, but the customers just kept tossing food in their baskets. I decided to take my business elsewhere. My horoscope today told me to buy in bulk anyway, so I knew I was not in the proper location with which to fulfill my destiny.

Scorpio: That’s mania, I tell ya. You’ve got some interesting shit, interesting stuff, I mean, going on. Tell me again about that store stuff? But listen to this. As I was driving to the dentist today I swear I saw my own couch on the side of the road. The same couch I fell asleep on, next to your friend last night. Alison. I swear my couch was out there on the road, same foam coming out on the side, same fuzzy green.

Two moons: No!

 

Cycle 8: the LK’s.

Under your bed, you’ll find a crawling bug which claims itself as a pretender to your throne. Later, your pillows will hum, whistle, and shriek.

The Broken Vases: Clean your plate, you may not get fed again. Scrub behind the door or the rats will be running again.

Scorpio: Be careful what pies you stick your thumbs into. You don’t want your thumbs to disappear like those few minutes you lose in the shower every morning.

Toro: You will encounter an apple-shaped obstacle today. I have no idea what you ought to do when it comes, except you should certainly not throw it south or east. Be careful with knives.

The handsome young peasant led his bull down the road. The sun was hot and led sweaty rivulets down the bull’s black hide. The peasant wiped his own brow and paused to give the animal a rest. Just then, he noticed an apple in the middle of the path. Moving closer to pick it up - for he had walked all morning and was quite hungry - he realized it was not an apple after all, but a large, red-hued stone. He picked it up, thinking of the journey ahead and hoping that the sun would journey quickly across the broad sky.

The bull stood in place, breathing and looking at the boy with its large dark eyes. The boy cursed the stone and thought of the meager gruel that his grandmother would have waiting when he reached home. He kicked the dust in the road and threw the stone behind him.

As he whistled to the bull and began walking toward the horizon, he heard a soft call from behind.

"Oh, boy! Boy!"

He turned around. It was a lovely girl, just slightly older than he, with hair like the autumn sun and a strand of posies laced around her slender neck. He saw that she was holding the reddish stone.

"Boy, you tossed this in my garden. You’re lucky it didn’t hit our cat!"

She looked at him with a mischevious glint in her eyes.

He turned slowly to face her. The bull breathed heavily in the heat.

"I’m sorry," the girl said. "You must be so tired and hungry. Come into the shade of our house and have some supper."

The peasant boy thought of the distance left to go, and felt the weight of the pack on his back. His grandmother would be expecting the coins from the few things he had managed to peddle in the village. But he was hungry, and the girl looked so sweet and kind. He followed her into the cottage, after she had helped him tie the bull to the gatepost.

Inside the shady kitchen, bundles of herbs hung from the walls, and wildflowers sprouted from heavy blue vases. The home was small but tidy, and the girl brought out a pitcher of cool dandelion wine and poured the boy a mugfull.

The boy found himself feeling very quiet. Then he spoke.

"Who do you live here with?"

"Oh, only my mother. She is ill, lying down upstairs. Perhaps you might go up and meet her. I’m sure she would appreciate some new company."

The peasant did not want to be anywhere but this shady kitchen, talking with this strange girl who only looked at him calmly and refilled his mug. He gulped down the heavy bread that she placed in front of him. She gave him fresh quince pie and he ate it with his fingers, licking the juice off of his thumbs. Again, she placed a plate of meat and cheese before him and he left nothing behind. The girl smiled, as if she had all the food in the world to share. And meanwhile, he ate as if he would never see food again. The boy could not remember when he had tasted food so delicious.

"Come now," she said, "let’s go meet mother. I’m sure she is starved to speak to someone besides me."

They crept up a narrow flight of earthen stairs and then were in a small alcove. The boy looked at the bed but it was neatly made, and the girl’s mother was nowhere to be seen. He looked at the girl quizzically.

"Oh, my mother must be sitting in the sun in back. Sit down."

"I should really keep walking …" the boy said, but the girl just looked at him with her silent green eyes. She touched him on the face.

[insert beginning of passionate sex scene here]

Suddenly - he didn’t know if it was the dandelion wine or the summer heat - the beams in the ceiling seemed to be vibrating, pulsating … The room was shaking, and from the pillows came a low but steady hum.

The boy looked at the girl’s face but it seemed blank. She continued unlacing his britches, kissing him, and humming softly t� herself - or was it the pillows?

The room was spinning now, the bed emitting a shriek which seemed to vibrate within the walls. The boy looked down and saw a large black spider crawling from beneath the bed.

Somehow he managed to evade her clutches and ran down the stairs tot he kitchen. The kitchen was now in shambles, the pretty vases broken, rats running across the floor. The shade of the afternoon had turned dark and eerie.

He heard the girl behind him, her feet oddly heavy on the stairs. Her voice sounded harsh, like pebbles hurled at the ground. When he heard her words, he could barely believe them.

"I’ll get your thumbs, boy! I want your thumbs!"

He felt feverish and looked down at his hands, which were caked with dirt …