Poems Submitted for April 20, 2021

By S.Atticus O.

Horoscope - Libra
October, 2020
Libra, your libido
Is high today
But don’t cry, your time
Will come in coming months
When you’ll no longer come
Into the drain but your love.
That’s right Libra, you’ll find
Yourself in the arms of your pen pal
After the hardest two months of your life -
November’ll suck most, rain soaked, barely breathing,
Scrambling at the edge of an abyss unseen but felt deep.
One to run from East to South to farthest West - where love is -
But first you must suffer the slings arrows and seas of troubles and oppose
Nightmares with nightly waking hours before you can dream sweet
Dreams at the side of a tall crane, where you, crow, will know your place
Is found at their side by December. Absolutely positive by New Years.
So Libra, would you like a lifetime subscription to daily horoscopes?
Or be surprised by both the immense pain
And more immense joy?
Your choice.

A little levity for a situation with much gravity
By Renée Szostek

Illness will reign. You
shall remain in your domain,
not thrilled, and complain.

Leo
By MP

There's a calm surrender...

To the joy of a birthday, celebrated on a hot August afternoon;
The lion will sit on the edge of a gorge, with oversized feet, long awkward legs, and an unkempt mane;
The lion will sit in the lap of a happy afternoon, drink in its sweet-cool refreshment, and swat at the buzzing hoverflies;
The lion will sit, restless, uneasy;
The lion will stir as the ground quakes and trees shake;
The lion will stand, then leap; the lion will not run away;
The lion's legs will grow strong, shoulders broad, mane proud;

... It's (almost) enough to make kings and vagabonds
Believe the very best.

Happy Birthday Sagittarius

Happy Birthday Sagittarius.
It’s your big day. You will have
a forgettable birthday, perhaps, but the year ahead—

Your year will be full of things you will do without needing to think
about them. You don’t need any advice. You’ll
end the year with some regrets: hair products you bought because
you were bored
scrolling, scrambling, through the private lives of those
you barely know, forced (by yourself) to witness
the stew they made for dinner. You’ll

switch over to Twitter before you throw up. Your year will
get worse after that. But you opened this link
because you thought I could tell you something
you wanted to know.
Because you wanted to know. Not
because didn’t already know. So

Sagittarius. In the year ahead
do not assume the worst. Sometimes
the end is much more boring than what you could ever imagine.
Every day, try
to reach out to one person you don’t like (over
email or Facebook messenger) and tell that person what you
love about them. Try
not to sound sarcastic. (If
you’re at risk, it
never hurts to add
an emoji of a cat.)

My advice to you is simple, but you’ll
be doing whether it whether I tell you to or not. So, be prudent
with your opinion-sharing. (Keep
your mouth shut, Sagittarius: could you just do that even once?)
And then, do what gives
you yourself and
at least a few other humans or animals or plants on Earth
some comfort or pleasure or diminishment of suffering
or assistance or joy or just try
to make someone laugh while you’re still alive.
Because after you aren’t
you can punish yourself and
everyone else
while you’re buried underground or scattered as ashes or
the subject of an experiment on a generously donated
corpse or an unidentified body found
in a ditch by the side of the road
in a brightly shining forensics lab (the tile—all that white:
you can already
smell it if you close your eyes for a minute…) Well, then—

you may feel free to wallow.
It’s a free country, after all, the one to which we’re all
eventually headed. There

you may say and do whatever you want
forever, as soon as you get there. But my advice for you:

This year, should you be lucky enough to have
your license renewed for it:

Do not get involved with an Aries.
The ascent of your Jupiter will collide
with the descent of their Mars.
The neighbors will call the cops.

Be happy! But if, like
so many Capricorns have done in the past, you’re just
going to text me to ask how to know
what that is, just
go back to what
you were going to do anyway, whether
you wanted to do something differently next year, or
not:

Click here to renew your subscription.
Click here to learn more about Depression.
Click here to order extra cheese with this.
Click here if you have a problem with gambling.
Click here to read more about this tragic event.
Click here to participate in a tragic event.
Click here to report sexual harassment.
Click here to see someone shot.
Click here to see someone raped.
Click here to like the poodle on a bicycle.
Click here to unfriend.
Click here if you’re a victim, and click
here if you want to say something to inflict
pain upon someone you think just clicked
because they wanted to be a victim. Click.
here if you wish to donate
to a cause you cared about a year ago.
Click here if, on your sandwich, you’d like
extra mustard, or beauty, or sin, or mayo.
(Extra charges may, all year, apply.)