THE TIMELESS SPIRAL IN ORDINARY LIFE

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Today's prompt is a show-stopper. Found Poetry Review's Matt Trease asks us to get ahold of our natal birth chart here (aside: remember when you'd have to give all your information to an astrologer who'd take it away and work it all out and get back to you a week or two later? This took approximately 30 seconds), make a note of the zodiac signs and their degrees, have a look at what one Elias Lonsdale put together in 1993 here with regard to what the signs/degrees may mean, and finally to "Try to compose a poem using (predominantly) the language of the symbols and their meaning. If you want a real challenge, try to use every symbol associated with your birth chart with as few syntax changes as possible."

To this end I've made very brief notes from what I read and they will be the poem that I'm about to transcribe. ... And now that I've transcribed I'm going to go through and change any references to maleness to femaleness. Other than that, and my punctuation, the words all come from the Lonsdale link. I'm titling it with the last line. Or no, I'm using another line. 


The Timeless Spiral in Ordinary Life

Pigs being fed,
feast or famine, on or off,
spiritual emaciation chronically hooked,
come afresh to life, hungry and willing.

A beaded curtain—iceberg person—
a woman with a single horn coming out of her forehead,
something missing; make the difference in all of its glory,
the timeless spiral in ordinary life.

A silver trident—for everything there is a season,
rats with ruby eyes may lose the path in the mists
climbing the steps of the pyramid of the sun,
always aware of vaster picture,
absolute knowing.

A woman doing delicate embroidery,
subtle, underlying echoes and resonances lost in time.

Stay in touch.

Men and women in white towels in a steam bath, 
talking and sweating profusely, sensing what it is like
to be human, to be wounded, to be searching—
as one who kept at it.

A red-faced woman, tears running down her cheeks.
She is laughing convulsively in the warp between worlds,
almost invisible the role the self is playing,
sprung into a different realm at last.

A woman talking in her sleep—going so deep
in there, an altered state but oh, the dreams, the vapours—
Remembrance          Recapitulation          Return
dammed up. 

Naive wistfulness!

A doctor experimenting on herself with new drugs.
What counts is the truth—a strange truth.

Learn to feel again.

Who deserves to be here?

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