Ruled by Mercury
Let's workshop this poem, a quasi epistolary poem, where the narrator celebrates a connection with an unnamed traveler (depicted as smart, adaptable, expressive, social, curious, and versatile)
Ruled by Mercury Yet I love mamma least for her physical beauty, however much of a Helen—the West’s original femme fatale—she is. Ruled by Mercury (blazing curiosity always set to evolve, energetic with kicks and jumps for public eyes and cameras), yet she takes her time to read me, one of the few things— along with the bright sun that bleaches her curls— she clutches, a thing secret to her like a traveler’s memento from childhood, as solar winds carry her throughout the world. My mission’s virtue she sees through the mocking of peers and family—my very own too finding me an easy target. Her standards high, and yet she lets me be the only one to lift her as if I were a poet dead in a college classroom (where she knows I belong). She would have to be a saint if she lets go to me like this each day in full awareness of what she is doing. Even if it is all done subconsciously, I have yet to feel so loved. She honors me as if a wife, fighting at my side far away in honor of truth (even if it means violating taboos), fighting too in honor of me— even though I might never see. I want to be better now. And so I need to thank her— you, a fox, a cheetah, of nuance; a bonobo prepared to live in defiance of standard scripts (black, female, millennial)— a mockingbird prepared to learn the reserved ways of hedgehogs; a dolphin prepared to practice the solitary ways of owls; an octopus prepared to try out the unbending ways of koalas; a radical prepared to oppose the unnuanced mob violence, the cruel toxicity, of her own side; a woman prepared to call out her own bullshit and apologize. What an astral love, pure in its blossoming beyond probability of bodily touch!
This poem is unpublished
Painting: michelleanderst.tumblr.com/post/136189401981/gemini-air-sign-mutable-ruled-by-mercury-this