Gemini Season, Mercury Retrograde

A Gemini walks into a bar twice

is that how we start the joke?

Something about two faces two personalities

double-sided like a trick coin

good side I steal all your fingerbones

bad side I love you forever

or something like that.

I am not a Gemini but I know someone who is

and the wine of her love is sweet as cherries

tilted like an asking

sour cherries rolling off the slanted table

leaving trails of red juice on the antique tablecloth.

Mercury is in retrograde

and you know what that means.

A Gemini is two people

severed by God’s paring knife

sliced in half like a ripe tomato

juice and seeds spilling onto the firmament

like little yellow treasures.

A Gemini is two people

split apart like the joint of a crab leg

cracked and pulled and please, suck the meat out.

Gemini season falls around us like

two hands covering our eyes and saying

guess who.

Unfinished business in retrograde

overdue clarity in retrograde

Gemini with her two heads in the toilet

lift your eyes to the window

and behold the sun rising twice for you.

Gemini is a Medusa

if Medusa only had one snake hair.

The duality of the twin

with their backs to each other

walking through doorways and covering all their bases.

Mercury fistfights Neptune in Pisces

and Pisces curls up in the corner and cries

the confusion of the win clouding decisions on June 5th.

But the eye of the sun will pass over the earth

casting her imposing silhouette like a clenched fist

on June 10th

while the moon disappears for a while

sheds her skin and becomes new.

The solar eclipse and the new moon

hold hands over a canyon

fingers straining against the distance

but they stay together for Gemini

so Gemini can take the first wobbling steps in a new direction.