Ter (Old sign: Scorpio) Early snows have ficked your squash and frosted your pumpkins. A hecatomb of cattle for Pan! What else will be taken? Subject object verb and adjective! All roll in the dustpan with your fossilized bones.
Shang-ti (Old sign: Sagitarius) Could you have done anything different? Of course you could have, but it is your destiny to think on it for a while. Don’t stay in analysis too long! Linger on the details that could help your endless error correction.
Gih-Na-Sha (Old sign: Capricorn) You could have done something different. You knew better and you did it anyway. Now you are at a crossroad again and how you hate the insecurities of the choices before you; each path provides immensity of space and time but you are stuck. Hang in there! Choose but don’t choose too blithely nor to seriously and all ways will lead on to way.
Hahp-E (Old sign: Aquarius) The wheat berries are all dead. Frost makes a crinkly mockery of your work. Gluten is out of fashion anyway. Some consolation. Index finger bones: roll your bones alone! You don’t have to like jazz!
Hehk-Eht (Old sign: Pisces) You took your last meal months ago and now it’s up to your metabolism. Hibernation will give you all you need but you wish you had been two or three fish more motivated. More of the brain and roe and less of the steak— leave the steak for the carrion hunters and scavenger beetles. Next time eat more brains.
Kah-Le (Old sign: Aries) The End How can it get any worse, Gawain? How long you been in that hole? A day? A week? A year? Eons? Maybe we’ve never been anywhere else. Camelot and Xanadu. The keep and the forest of wyrd wyrms. All the land of our own fancy. At sunset it begins to snow; through the thick vault of pine boughs wet plops rouse you from drooling sleep. Look at that beard of yours growing into the moss! Your mind is gone, sir! Your body would be too had that squirrel brigade not brought you some acorns. Tannins give you the shits. “Ah, Christmastide already!” You proclaim in the darkness. And sing a jaunty song which no one hears! The Green Knight has stood watch all this time. Now he rises and lights all the hanging lanterns of his chapel. “The season of lights!” Cicadas sing you to your doom. But through the drone, you hear the solitary bullfrog and the lonely cricket mournfully chirp-croaking just for you, a perfect dance of tender exchanges of waddles and legs. Like the spectral dancers of the woods in your youth. Or the cloud you thought had come to smother you, dissipated like the exsanguinated wyrms. And you remember all your life in a flash, as we often do when mortally threatened. A purple sky of your mind’s eye sees the silent star and wish you sent up really came down to me, Gawain. Your true mother! Yes, here is the trembling seed of your hope! And there it is in the axe. Sriiiiiiiiiiiing! The Green Knight swings his singing blade upon you and a miss! A glorious miss! Fuck me running! A razor cut weeps on the nape and runs down the spine. Scores of fuzzy Christmastides, colored lanterns on a string. Prologue: The Green Knight pulls you forth from the tomb and instantly transforms into the lady of the keep. She is smiling and wrathful, she is a thief of light and the source. The gown contains all life in all the writhing hungry contours and folds. She suckles two goats and speaks in a strange shrill accent: “do you know now who has been singing your song?” Prologue Part 2 next month!”
Ah-Naht (Old sign: Taurus) Mosquito mother needs your blood. There is no dance but that of survival. No sales pitch. Her unborn children are hungry. Are you in the mood to feed her? Think of what she might produce! Do you dare feed potential vectors of disease?
Eh-Shu (Old sign: Gemini) Ahhh. So wonderful to lay those burdens down! Your wagon wheels are all broke and your feet are sore. But for this moment you have peace. Aches here and there but you have peace. Wolves howling out in the arroyos. But right now. Well, you may want to chamber a round. The odd Frenchman produces a stringed instrument and begins to sing a roundel. The alien beats out a bit about some birds, and if you really listen, like one who plays make-believe, you may just feel the spirit of the tune!
Tah-Na (Old sign: Cancer) Walk with trees and dance with them too! Don’t be afraid of the words you may earn! Don’t be a beggar even if you are one! Will your need to be needed ever abate? I can see the rags of your beggary through the pinstriped suit and the advertising endorsements! Hollow men and chittering ladies with smoldering brands! Oh, how the fiery marks reek of hair and hide and flesh!
Marutuk (Old sign: Leo) Do you remember your life as a predator? I remember a life of a lioness. After waiting my turn, I fed and fed looking up from under heavy brows and boughs ignoring a vast savanna night. “You all crows and buzzards and hyenas must wait for me! We feed first and you will feed on the scraps and the putrid offal. It is our offering.
Kah-Noom (Old sign: Virgo) In blackness of meditation upon Don Death is there anything but your consciousnesss? Why not add an extra “s” in these dionysian times? A little excess to get you seated properly on the pillow? You know now none of those tinctures nor snake oils nor long-life cannnolis will do any good now. Best practices tell us no more physical restraints!
Hih-Fes-Tuhs (Old sign: Libra) Winter slams shut the door of summer and swiftly every gale breezes through unseen cracks in your walls. No matter how hot you stoke that potbelly you cannot survive such ventilations! Repair! Repair! Make all haste to undo the ravages of time with practical manual work!