jellyfish + satellites

Tell me about a place where a silvery forest glints with imaginary flies, kind and gentle with their wings, blue flecks that catch the sun, their only trace.

It’s a place where pine needles dance along the soft floor and sap sticks between the dark bits. There is a green pond, suede-like, with leaves skirting the surface. Turtles, somewhat mythic in my recollection, bathe and ducks sleep at night. And in that night, the air is all fig and jasmine and big white flowers and dusty stars and salt. And at home, the sun speckles through lacy holes in white curtains as woodlice cuddle in the corners.

That’s home but no one else seems to think so.

Wherever you go you meet yourself, it’s old and it’s true,
Like a snake eating its tail, a constant feedback loop of me, me, me.

I read about a tiny immortal jellyfish, the Turritopsis dohrnii. Floating in that deep blue sea, it sinks to the seabed when injured, metamorphosing into a copy of its younger self. Baby again, your life all around you, unformed and for the taking and spilling into blue. Feathery tentacles and a gentle glowing veil and endless second chance.

Sometimes it feels like tiny sparkling dragons are sneaking through the gaps in my ribcage. Sometimes there are silverfish in my sofa.

Sometimes something calls, the fur bristling at the apex of your spine,
so you flee down the alley across the field into the night, wild horses.

A light house perched at the edge of a cliff, a candle kept burning for someone out there in those dark waves. A home at the edge of hope. The moon as a lighthouse, shining for us all. Coyotes howling at the moon in a lonely desert.

The crackle of companionship over the radio. A whoosh of happening through the open window. Pooling puddles overflow with sentiment while the shimmer of the everyday peels from the edges. All our lush worlds teeming with intimacies and stories that unfurl between us and your self, lonely and all together.

Pass the time by threading it all together.

Tell me about another place, a place with a snaking dark tunnel long and mossy. Soundproofed by plush green fur and no echoing drops.
Running and running its mouth jolts open without warning, so what can you do but go
into the low lying neon green lichens and brittle yellow-purple moss. No trees, no verticality but a falling frozen glacier, suspended in its rush.

I learnt about satellites orbiting around us and how we have abandoned the technology required to read their analogue signals, their invisible frequencies transmitting secret data, just waiting for someone to tune in. These specific satellites shut down last year, but they are still silently orbiting through the dark. When we still bothered to read their signals, they showed us swirling spirals of clouds, clues for an nascent tornado, the logic of a whirlwind. Peaceful and static before ripping and tearing through it all.

Bluebottle flies fly into blue objects, the deep magnetic blue, every time.
I watch a magpie collect another shiny treasure for their nest.
Home is not a place it’s a feeling, says the cursive font of a faded poster somewhere.