#thesunthemoonandallmystars

[csoip]

the wreck of the earth

humans are in the same category
as natural disasters for things that cause destruction. we are worse than hurricanes, hollow planes above cities. a masterpiece of catastrophe.

we are well-intended, to a point. the point is this: there is something dying and we refuse to save it. to even look at the damage we have done.

i am no exception.

and this is how we wreck what we have learned to love: by trying to save it or loving it in the first place.

[csoip]

uranus has a bad reputation

that they don’t deserve. uranus knows all the whores & fuqbois & faggots. they don’t always deserve it either. there’s a club for people like them: the membership list is written on the insides of bathroom stalls, sent in group texts, gossiped about behind a hand over a mouth familiar with the lips of someone who was in it. uranus doesn’t know why people make jokes & laugh at their expense. everybody’s talking but nobody’s telling them. (doesn’t mean they don’t hear it.) uranus knows all the secrets about drinking till you forget & having sex like it doesn’t matter & the drugs to make you feel better than high. that’s the bad part. all anyone ever says is about how to save someone from themselves. no one ever talks about what happens when they don’t need to be saved. how you can be okay & not be what’s expected. how the “whores” & “fuqbois” & “faggots” grow up to be alright. how they grow past what people think & knowing what you can do is better than not having tried at all. but it is never once easy. nobody ever notices the scars on those whores’ wrists because they’re too busy with the body. nobody looks past the face to see the mind inside. and god forbid they see the love and not the sex that everything is objectified to mean. but if they want it: own it. give them the anarchy, give them the sex, take the reputation that precedes you and walk into the room, two fingers up to yesterday saying fuck the whole universe. tear it down to make your own.

[csoip]

venus hates apostrophes and burning

because they’re always to the dead. the dead can’t hear you anyway, so it doesn’t matter if you shout. shout louder, even, because they’re dead. or have a conversation with the sun, shout at him instead. venus is the sun’s abusive lover, living next door. not abusive; tired. the sun still shines and venus tries to reason him away. i don’t love you anymore, venus says, and the sun gets too close still- like he doesn’t understand what this means. that venus can feel him everywhere, the atmosphere, skin blistering at a touch, his whole self burned away to leave only ash, that heat trapped inside- and venus shines brighter because of him, hopeful for something but god, doesn’t the sun know it’ll never work? a coat of armour for protection, another wasted shield and still. still, venus can’t get the light to go away and blinding is the sun’s only setting. it burns down to the truth of it, that venus only wants an apostrophe in the words “the sun’s” like a possessive and he’s tired of writing love letters to the dead or talking to the ghost of his self before the flames, venus only says those things because the sun would be better off without the second best. second closest, not even brighter than a star. the sun turns away and turns back, he always comes back, and venus wants to cry again with the heat of his gaze. no arrows, no apostrophes, no burning venus hates burning because it always means the sun, and red hands remind him of what he’s done. i’m sorry doesn’t cut it when you’ve cut too deep. he closes the door, shuts the window, turns the key and he’s still shaking, cold at the core where the light never reached. 67 million miles can’t keep out a chill. 67 million miles and venus burning still. apostrophe, from apostrophiese, to turn away. i don’t want to keep running, venus says, still half-shielding from the light. i don’t want to keep turning away.

[csoip]

the apparition jupiter

i don’t really feel like i’m there, the ghost of jupiter says. it hovers somewhere in the middle as an unsettling voice booming from above with no body to accompany it. it’s just like i don’t exist, the planet says in a hazy shroud of mist. all the ominous portents are making their way towards jupiter in a procession. that gaseous body shifts even further from view as the spin of red-orange storms whips across beneath the surface, hurricanes and thunderstorms brewing inside with no containment. lightning will strike. but who will get struck? not jupiter, the disaster passing through like the dawn. so mighty, and reduced to so little. the planet fades to a dull sunset, an afterimage leaving this feeling that there should be something there that isn’t.

[csoip]

talking down pluto

i don’t say this right, pluto says at the edge of a cliff, a solar system, a void. i miss my small belonging. i want to jump. i don’t want to. i want someone to miss me too. i think i know what you mean. it’s okay. i’m lonely too.

[csoip]

the moon is a girl who likes my sweaters and other girls

the moon & i aren’t friends to say the least about the status but she’s just jealous i get skinny & she only disappears. once she said she was lesbian and tbh that’s what i thought but i would never tell her so. sometimes i let her kiss me and she wears my clothes till they wear out & afterwards they smell like rain. she said she lets me kiss her too.

[csoip]

the sun is a boy who loves flowers, chocolate, and other boys

he got burned once, this he told me by solar radiation & a daisy chain. a dove kiss he puts in my mouth, in his, in his mouth, presses it to his lips. he burns too, all the time. not like you thought or had ever known. who imagined being bright could hurt. i’m no different from any other star boy said to boy said to me, cried with a bouquet out his mouth. i still miss it you know. the sun & i are in the same therapy group for reasons unknown & in a hard metal chair he just keeps saying with soft eyes but i thought, it was alright, because he was so gentle.

[csoip]

mars told me bitter was for candy and ex-lovers

you see he said sitting on a car dashboard (one would think he had a bike, planetary god and all) as he lifted up a piece of valentine’s day candy hearts, this is how we live. we love and love and love, candy hearts with a backdrop of sunsets, always for the dramatic. you fall apart and get back together, they betray you and you accept their pitiful reasons, but it’s not like that. he said it wasn’t like that with his leather jacket and little green convertible car, the god of war on every front- for the ecosystem, for the minority, for the dead, for the oil, for the refugees, for the victims, for the soldiers, for the remembered. it gets lonely out there he told me don’t be hateful that’s not something that ends well. he is in a desert and a war and he looked up at what was now the night with candy hearts in his pocket on the hood of a green car and said yeah, it isn’t worth it.