When The Moon Is In The Seventh House

I. Mythical Fairy Tale

Our encounter was like a chocolate cake baked by a witch:
warm and rich and fat with an inviting aroma
licking playfully at your nostrils,
but laced with a toxic magic potion
made from exotic and ambiguous substances
and sealed with a spell somewhere in the middle gray
on the scale of intentions.

She appeared out of nowhere;
a shadow materializing
from the dark spaces between the trees.
I looked up from the stones and charred wood
of the fire pit and there she was.

Black, black hair like a wizard's cat on a starless night,
black like the deepest, sunless shelf in the ocean.
And black, black eyes like the mouth of a cave,
inviting exploration and threatening to engulf you in their darkness.
Eyes with a red shiver that burned like molten lava
bubbling under a blackened crust.

And as we took each other in,
a jolt of electricity arced from her eyes to mine,
and lit me up like Franklin's kite.
And like a comic book hero or Japanese monster
transformed by radiation, that twitchy-nosed whammy
twisted me temporarily into someone else.

Someone who brazenly went searching
for a woman he had barely spoken to,
with the absolute certainty that she wanted him
and could not resist his newly-minted charms.

Or had she planted a seed of desire with her eye-beam zap
which was now taking over the orderly garden of my mind
like an out-of-control synaptic kudzu vine.

Or had the intersection of our energy fields
simply shifted me to a higher octave.

Whatever the case may have been,
she apparently did not want to be found that evening,
although, hound-like, I could sniff out the spore
of her presence at an empty campsite.

She was probably bouncing and bopping through the woods
in one of her shape-shifted animal forms,
hunting birds for sport
and frightening campers for the sheer fun of it.

I meandered dreamy and fairy-touched into the forest
and stood inside a circle of stones,
breathing in the cool, crisp static in the air.
A spiritual interference tuned my thoughts
to dim broadcasts of shamanic scenarios;
hazy figures, half-human, half-animal,
dancing on the periphery,
feathers, paint and sweat,
and spastic shadows cast by firelight.

And later that evening, as I lay in my sleeping bag,
the forest covered me in a cool protective blanket,
and sang me lullabies of the marriage of my flesh and the soil,
and my bones and the rocks.

The next day, I met her on the trail at the top of the mountain.
And once again, I was magnetized and galvanized
like a lightning rod to ground her charge.
"I looked for you last night," I said.
"I know," she replied in her silent voice,
even as her mouth was forming other words.

She was headed in one direction
and my companion and I were headed in the other,
so phone numbers were exchanged and promises were made, et cetera,
but I was dubious and deflated, expecting never to see her again.

But the currents were conspiring to draw me back to her.
Car keys, locked doors, notepads and confusion,
and a knowing look from my friend
sent me back up the mountain to find her.

Somewhere midway between top and bottom,
we zeroed in on each other telepathically
like bees to a hive.
"I heard you calling me," she said.
"I know," I said,
and we sat down together in the middle of the path
with all the familiarity of a kid brother and sister
playing in the family sandbox.

And the sun warmed us and lubricated our tongues,
and we spun great glistening spider-silks of words
that wrapped us and dipped us in honey
like the sweetest of dyadic morsels.

I felt as if I could tip her head back like a pez dispenser
and climb right inside of her
and eat up all of her multi-colored candy.
And she could strip off my brittle, translucent exoskeleton
like some molting insect,
and release the pink tender larva inside.

She took my hand and twirled around me
weightless like a will-o'-the-wisp,
and we made plans for various adventures
as if we were already life-long road-partners.

She presented me with a bracelet,
skin-hexed and hoodooed, as a parting gift,
promising she'd come see me soon.
And I wore the bracelet in the shower and to bed,
breathing in her spice
and her sanctified glandular brew.

And I dreamed of flying through the air with her,
and dancing naked in a meadow,
she with garlands and necklaces of bones,
and I with hooves, horns and springtime phallus.

II. Postmodern Psychodrama

It was a day like any other at the macrobiotic
cooperative group house I lived in.
Brown rice was cooking on the stove,
people were meditating, doing yoga, and chopping vegetables.
A day like any other, except that I was waiting
for this incredible, priapism-inducing sorceress
of slobbering animal sex I had met while camping to come visit me.

She had phoned me from New Jersey that morning
to say she was on her way, so I expected her at any moment.
I needed something to distract me from my excitement and impatience,
so I turned to my recently begun study of astrology
and picked up the book I was currently devouring.

I learned that I had Uranus in my seventh house,
which meant that my love life was always going to be full of surprises;
people suddenly appearing and disappearing,
bombs dropped on my head, rugs pulled out from under my feet,
upsets, turn-arounds, shocks, spills and thrills;
a roller-coaster ride straight through the fun-house mirrors,
with slivers of glass blinding the clowns and lacerating the midgets.

I looked at the clock.
It only took three hours to drive to Philadelphia from north Jersey.
She should have arrived hours ago.

I read further and discovered that I also had Pluto in my seventh house,
which meant that I tended to become obsessive over my love-objects,
and compulsive in my interactions with them,
and that having sex with a woman
was like stuffing my cock into Pandora's box and prying off the lid,
letting loose every Freudian Krafft-Ebing nightmare aberration and abomination
dreamed up in the slimy, perspiring, collective brain-crotch of humanity.

The sky was now dark outside my window
and I had not heard a peep or a jingle from her all day,
and true to my horoscope, I was freaking out,
alternately fearing she had run into foul play
and thinking I had been blown off and callously abandoned.

My housemates tried to calm me with the voice of reason.
"You know you take these kinds of things way too seriously," they said.

The next day I woke up feeling like excrement in the process
of being wiped off the bottom of someone's shoe.
I had pretty much written her off,
but that didn't stop the feeling of a battalion of rats
gnawing away at my intestines.

I went to a Greek festival for distraction and ate a gyro
and when I got back there was a message for me on the answering machine.
It was her! And she sounded like she was stoned out of her kug.
All I could make out from her slurred, rambling and broken bleatings
was that she was down on South Street with her brother and sister
(Brother and sister? What the hell was that about?)
and that she wanted me to meet her there.

I felt a small sense of relief from the new-found notion
that she was totally fucked-up,
and flakier than really flaky pastry;
kind of a "sour grapes" reaction.
Meet her on South Street, my ass!

But before I had time to feel really smug and self-righteous,
the phone rang.
It was her again, but now she sounded clear-headed and lucid.
I guess the drugs had worn off.
She wanted directions to get to my house.
I tried to be witheringly sarcastic,
but she, in her tail-wagging innocence, was not picking up on it.
What the hell, I thought. I had nothing to lose.
And she was so fucking hot!

I opened the front door a half an hour later
expecting the sweet, pony-tailed hippie-chick
I remembered from the mountains;
sexy and pretty, but dressed in a way
that would not be out of place at a Wal-Mart.

Instead, I was confronted by the model
the Marquis De Sade might have chosen
if he had been a designer of haute couture clothing
for porn magazine photo-shoots.

She was wearing a very tight and very short black leather mini-skirt,
fish-net stockings and stiletto heels,
and a little black vest that her milky-white breasts
were spilling out of like oversized mozzarella cheeses.
And her hair was a wild, untamed explosion
of black spirals, snakes and corkscrews,
like a science-fiction plant-creature
looking to take root and destroy civilization.

If we'd been in a cartoon,
you would have seen my eyeballs pop out of my head
and extend five feet in front of me on their little eye-stalks
with an accompanying ah-oogah sound.

III. Twentieth Century Bohemian Farce

Cast:
Man
Woman
Bum
Lady Bum

Scene one: Early evening. The lawn outside a large turn-of-the-century house.

Woman: No--they're not my real brother and sister. I met them in New York City
before I came here to see you. They've been living on the street for a
couple of years.

Lady Bum: I used to be an executive at a fortune 500 company, and one day I just
said fuck it! Ya know?

Man: Wow that's... pretty cool...
(turing to audience)
Can you fucking believe this?! She has the balls to show up here a day
late with these brain-damaged sewer-spooks? This guy looks like he hasn't
bathed since the 60s. I'll bet his clothes have fused to his skin like
one of those mollusks that secretes it's own shell. And this stupid-ass
woman who thinks living like a third-world refugee is romantic. What's
going to happen when her savings from that high-profile job she bailed from
run out? My housemates are only putting up with this because they know how
much I need to get laid.

Bum: Hey man--I like yer spontanious here-and-now...

Man: Uh... thanks...
(to audience, sarcastically)
Far out, man. Don't eat the brown acid.

The man and woman lie down on the blanket they're all sitting on and put their
arms around each other. The lady bum snuggles up to them and throws her leg
over their bodies.

Woman: (responding to man's alarm) It's okay--we all make love all together.

Man: (to audience) Oh my god! Is she for real? She's had sex with these
people?! What kind of fucking diseases are they carrying? They look like
they just crawled out of the Black Hole of Calcutta! This is a fucking
nightmare!
(to woman) Hey--why don't we go for a walk in the woods. It's right down
the street.

Scene two: A forest path illuminated by a full moon. The man and woman are
walking hand in hand.

Man: I've got the best of both worlds here. I can go two blocks and be in the
middle of Fairmount Park, and get on a bus and be in center city in
15 minutes.

Woman: So you really doubted whether I was going to come see you?

Man: Well, when you didn't show up after an entire day I didn't know what to
think. And what's the deal with these people? You could have called and
asked if it was alright to bring them. My housemates aren't too happy
about the situation.

Woman: I thought you were a universal man.

Man: I have no idea what that means.

They stop and kiss passionately. The woman starts to take off the man's shirt.

Man: What are you doing?

Woman: Why do you think I bought this blanket?

Man: Well--as great as that sounds, this path actually gets a lot of foot
traffic at night. I've got a nice, warm, cozy bed back at the house...

Scene three: A small bedroom. The man and woman are in bed together and the
covers are moving up and down.

Woman: Mmmm... you make love so fine...

Man: Mmmm... so do you...

Woman: I'm so tired though... I just need to sleep...
we can finish later, baby... I promise... okay?

They both fall asleep. Time passes. The man wakes up and watches the woman
sleeping.

Man: (to audience) I am so horny, but I don't have the heart to wake her up.
Look at her. Look at that face. She's a fucking angel!

IV. The Sun Casts Very Long Shadows

My time with my witch-woman from the mountains
came to a very unsatisfactory conclusion.

There was the revealing dream my rapidly moving eyeballs
screened on the back of my skull while sleeping next to her:
The two of us crawling into a hobbit-hole;
a fully-furnished underground womb with a circular door.
I remembered my astrology book.
Moon in the seventh house.
Moon equals womb. Sex equals safety.

There was her morning mood,
like an animal finding itself caught in a bear trap;
a siamese cat, distant and aloof,
waiting for the door to open just a crack
so she could zip out
and return to bird-chasing, mouse-dismembering freedom.

There was the familiar loathsome imp
spewing it's evil diarrhea into my ear,
telling me I'd done something wrong,
I'd fucked things up, said the wrong words,
displayed the wrong feathers, or colors on my ass.

There was the disgusting sight of the lady bum
pouring entire packets of sugar into her mouth,
and the gentleman bum, who looked to be about seventy in the morning light,
with dried bits of food encrusting his tangled, matted, foul-smelling beard,
telling me I should "go on the road" with them,
as if they were a traveling minstrel show.

There was me, offering her twenty dollars,
which bought a lot more in 1987 than it does today,
borrowed from one of my housemates,
so she could afford to stay another day,
and her, driving away in her car, tires squealing,
leaving me standing in the driveway
feeling like I'd just swallowed a slowly rotating outboard motor.

And there was her phone, ringing over and over again,
with no one answering.

Whoever wrote the song "The Age of Aquarius"
didn't know a fucking thing about astrology.
First of all, Jupiter aligning with Mars would probably not bring peace.
If anything, it would bring conflict.
Jupiter was probably aligned with Mars when Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated,
ushering in the First World War.
And Aquarius is great with ideologies but not so great with individuals.
Consequently, the age of Aquarius
has already given us fascism, communism and totalitarianism.

And the moon is not always the best heavenly body
to be occupying your seventh house.
Especially if you're a man.
It's like having your mother watching from the closet
while you're in bed with your lover.
Or worse, having your mother in the bed with you,
admonishing you and holding up cards with numbers,
evaluating your performance.

Fucking moon! I'd like to fire a rocket right into it's eye
like in that old silent movie.
When you're a lunar person in a solar world,
sometimes all you can do is wait for an eclipse.

David Aronson
June 2006