.mars .He still choked on goodbyes,words like 'charred' and 'charnel',but it always fell to Mars to makethe house of bone and regolith,to take fingerprints from the dead.He breathes the scenes of crimestime after time in his own grim theatre.Like a surgeon, he sculpts the earth,wreaks revenge and wreckages.Teethes soot and stones into the tired wingsof ribcages, wishbones - each onea promise. That one day,bulbs will breach the eyes of skulls,that fruits will fill the skypits of the lost.One day, these bruises will amuse, andall that bloodrush will be just blushbeneath his skin..
.vulcan .Dug deep beneath the earth, there is no light.No footholds to electric nights or larvae ofsynthetic flights. No future. Just Vulcan,bone lonely, with only his primitive kind of hungerand a longing to hear something other thanthe cemetery talking, walking over him. Unearthed.This is his forge, where the flower of amnesia,allowing one man to rewrite another, grows molten -blown into glass, gunpowder and pyrotechnic stars.Past, present, but only the future scars in the dark,this life in transition. And though over and overhe's said it's over and done with, there's alwaysmore. Always a greed, a need for hunger.God of
.jupiter .- Is this your first time drowning?I'd let you speak for yourself, but I notethat in your – not inconsiderable – credentials,it states you're a compulsive liar.And you've a throat of thunder, at that.You've been choking backon atelophobia ever since you wokeunder turpentine skies. Wondering whythe cat has nine times to dieand you have none.- What happened to the sun?You know only too well.You gripped it too tightand snuffed out the light.Show me your borders,your whalebone girt,and I'll show you the waythe rays will pucker your skinlike a Nazi lampshade.- What about the thunder?Yes, what ab
.mercury .It is the magnetism that brings him back,back, to the indigenous days of May, with itsterrestrial tilt and cadence of moonshine.That, or the wide smile of a rift – a chinkor broken link in time.That's it: it's simply scientific, he tells himself;the puckered truths, traded dreams, the guilt –it's all just a trick of kinetics, the fevered frictions(or fictions) of the messenger. Esoterics.But still. It's with pursed lips he meets the rip –the shafts of split light that belt Orionlike snakes stitched at the hip, or a cruel twistof fate, quick as silver. And this time there's no notefor him to relay or
.neptune .After the months spent in utero, walking feels strange.Ground is sound in colour, synaesthesia beneath the heels,watered down to reveal a horizon of endless blue, and Neptune.Opening himself like a oracle. He is all mouth: a throatof thunder, teeth a string of binary numbers. Kether of kelp,barnacle bones strewn in every bottled message, each letter ofHELP scrawled into the shoreline. A missing-person clue.Feet rubbed raw, he heads for the ocean, where those water-logged wishers wash such surface wounds with their salted tears.It's a pain that's only real when you're reeling, that you can onlyfind when hanging from fish
.apollo .Apollo, sleepcrawler, trawls the sky between day and night.Behind him, the sun enters like a dreamer, shattered. Kite-boned and obstinate, he soars toward time, dragging the rawwhite eye of light, fixed inside beside the solar plexus.[Just another dead weight.]This, he knows, is important. There are few things you can learnfrom a ball of burning gas and light eight minutes too late, butfrom his aerial migrations he's made several notations on life. One : to shoot stars, you must become bulletproof. Collect your heirlooms in the hatch of the attic, patch the holes in your roof,
.juno .Summer seeps back into focus once again, and Junospends the moonless nights bending back into spilt-oil images of sleep, lulled slick in a gulf cradle. Shedreams of tar babies, dredged from the deep, suckingthumbs and fingers that spread oceanwide with the tide.Each cry is sunken to a slumber, whilst someone shufflesand mumbles excuses about fishbones caught in throatsand how no-one knew nightmares could float on water.Only with heels congealed together could the tar childrentranslate the runes of an ocean beaten back into the ruinsof its own past, or understand how casting hydrocarbon-cutruts in the sea floor has sca
.minerva .Dawn, and Minerva murmurs from the riverbank.She's watching scrolls of blue mist drag the lake,unfurling remnants of a drowned world in its wake:a glint of fish-tail scales, the torn leaves of love letters,the bloated bulk of a plastic bag.She takes a piece of each and logs them in her bookof things she took from history, picked from the pocketsof time. Each has a story to tell: a singed feather; an emptysnail shell. The twisted limb of a tree. Each singswith its own broken flutings, its own fractured poetry. When the rivulet where we are borne and met dredges u
.venus .Venus broke the night. She sucked back the starsand started to shine with her own brightness. Sickof cold equations and mathematical divisions, allthese diametric fixations, she preyed for a collision;for the moon to tap into the craters beneath her fingernails.This, she called The Pruning - the sculpting of Edensout of satellites and solar winds, wound round her sides.She's tithed to her own tides, moodswung as a rivercut through her insides. She's happiest when her bloodis flooded with lovers swept into her depths, sunk intoastral sockets and crater lakes. Dreamdrunk on Venus'sweet venom, bloated with pride, they fl
.vesta .It is time. We feel the pull of summer along our spinesas we head into hibernation. Bed is short respite for our leaden limbs,our singed hair. The air aches with the wait of it, where the embersclick and sing like crickets. Snippets of sound from the underground."This," someone says, wide-eyed with awe, "is what the insidesof the earth look like" - the world beneath, struck through withdragons' teeth, pocked with open sores. The slit smile of the craterin a slack jaw. Our scarred skies are littered with lights, manymechanical suns spun into the ceiling, glinting like electric sequins.And in the middle of it all, where our
.ceres .Harvest rolls round again. We root up the ground, and in the remains,bury our dead. One day, it's said, she'll just stop loving us. Stop giving.There is a limit to all things. To every word, half-bitten backin the cheek; to every outstretched reach; to every breath, chokeddown. Ceres, the devoted. The sorrowing. Note: the two are remoteyet inseparable. To mother is to hold love in one hand, loss in the other,and fix them into the bone cradle of your chest, right and left. It is a savage rite of passage.So when Ceres steps from cities of corn to streets of crowded houses,the fields
.diana .There will be thick sleep tonight. Drugged on the dull anaesthesia of lullabies,even the anchorless feel the tug of the deep, consuming like a love, a hunger.Above, the moon sucks in the sky like a craving, wide-eyed. Dilate. Diana ditchedthe forest for the midnight; she's stitched herself to the undersides of stars.She spears and speaks through the mouths of clouds. Moondrunk, she's sunkinto the currents of our mumbled conversations; our fumbled demonstrationsof humanity. Hunting a heartbeat amongst a fleet of ghosts.Sleep is her uncountry; the estuary that feeds her sea of sky. She steerspast the arms of drowned suns and
Sta.sh
