March: Aries

Aries March 20 — April 19
If you leave the house with an industrial magnet hidden under your hat this week, you could lose your footing when the bus arrives. The fates are sending you messages on street signs. If the "Don't Walk" sign flashes your name in Morse code, you might want to step into traffic. Don't.

-Taken from ReadWritePoem.

Beneath my hat and hair is a world of ideas and they're out to get them. I know. Whenever I cross a street they lurch towards me, rage evident in their lumbering forms. They're fast, faster than they look and they tower over me as I am pulled away. Until that moment I remain unaware of their presence, lost in the life and activity around me as it paints pictures in my mind. The pictures are prettier than real-life, imbued with such shuddering colours that I can do nothing but halt my movements and stare - the oncoming traffic can wait.

I can feel the earth in my stride, it calls to me, telling its secrets so that I may write them down with the flourish of my pen. Don't walk, not yet. My mind fumbles over the words confused over their intentions even though the meaning is clear. I feel the pull of the tarmac. I hear it whispering sweetly in my ear, though it is far away. Don't walk. Please, don't walk.

My foot readies to step on the road.

And I'm on the floor, panting, as it roars past. A concerned face sits behind me, still holding onto my arm. The earth breathes a sigh of relief but I only look confused.

The Inventor

He'd worked for years to get this far, so many years of countless experimenting and disordered findings. He was the top of his field, though what that field was no one could tell. His name was not well-known, nor was his existence. He lived a solitary life, at the top of a tower, the rest of which lay uninhabitted by any living form.

The ticking was what made it noticeable, the clockwork tick that rang clear through the forest in which the tower sat. It was a lucky coincidence that the travellers from the nearest town just so happened to be passing when the ticking began it's annual mournful chorus. They say that the mechanism cannot feel emotion but they did not know his creations - they felt as well as any human being. Their loss was great.

Their existence was nothing but walking in circles, up and down the great tower. They had no purpose, not anymore. They were lifeless beings, simply existing. Their universe was a tower in a forest and nothing more. They knew nothing of the outside world and they did not need to. Their mournful movements fuelled them, kept them going.

But one day, it stopped. As the travellers walked the steps to the large brass doors of the tower the ticking stopped - silence swept through the forest with a chill like no other. And there they were - frozen mechanical figures like monuments in a churchyard.

He'd worked for years to get this far, surrounded by his machines. A skeleton trapped in a mechanism in a museum made from stone.

Envelope

It sits there, the table, mocking me. Smiling silkily at me and begging me to approach it, pick it up and look inside. But I can't. And it knows. It knows and yet it still begs and calls come closer, come closer... in its all too seductive tone. A wicked creature, it is, luring and lulling my hand.

But, there's a higher power, a loyalty to keep. My hand is stayed. It still screams its pleading words and sends it's sugar-sweet lust my way. It wants to be open, to be seen, to be freed. But I wait. I wait until that word comes floating into my periphery and into my mind and then, only then, will I given to its cacophonous coos of come closer, pick me up and give me life...