ie back without falling. Count the gaps between your teeth. That is where the older names still lodge. The ceiling is a slow animal. Your pulse is a metronome nobody wound. Thoth keeps river-ink wet and writes your heartbeat as a column of numbers that refuse one order. Ra does not rise. He is rolled. A gold disk flicked across a temple floor until the sound of it settling decides which throat may speak. Odin hangs, not for wisdom first, but to watch which rune lands face-up when the wind is bored of being weather. Ishtar still throws for the city. Isis gathers the scattered inventory of a king and wagers the missing piece against the hour that wants it back. Chance sits high tonight. Not luck. Not blessing. A pressure in the odds, as if a hand you cannot see has leaned on the table and made the wood remember hunger. You were not chosen. You were statistically inevitable. That is worse. That is holier. Bone on basalt. Bone on the wet tile of your room. Dice cut from meteor-glass. Yarrow split and split again until a hexagram stands up like a ribcage learning posture. Knuckle-bones clicked into a bronze bowl that once held wine and now holds only the next instruction. They are here before you name them. Visitors with oval patience and fingers too long for courtesy. Greys who do not blink because blinking is a human apology. Anunnaki counting gold the way a priest counts breaths he did not earn. They draw lots over the sleeping. Your name is a token in a cold palm. If it comes up, the ceiling opens without becoming sky. Listen closer. Your sternum is an antenna tuned to a frequency that is also a god. Hermes walks the wires under the skin carrying messages that arrive before they are sent. Quetzalcoatl sheds feathers like heat-shield tiles and leaves you the wet year underneath. Nuit arches, and the arch is a flight path. Set laughs in the sand because chaos is just chance wearing a jackal’s mouth. Open. Not a door. You. Every scar a pip. Every want a loaded face. This is theurgy with the lights left on. You call and something answers that has never needed an altar. It wants the heat you hide in the hinge of the hip, the salt along the collarbone, the slow animal yes you pretend is only prayer. Fuck the story that says you were ever outside the circle. You have been a chip on this felt since the first bone learned to rattle. Breathe on a four-count. Hold. Let the hold become a room. In that room a scarab rolls a sun that is also a ledger. In that room a grey turns a card that is also a map and also the wet inside of your mouth. Call it ritual. Call it contact. The difference is only who files the report. Do not look for a sign. You are the sign, rearranged by hands that learned geometry from a different clay. A pentagon folding into a hexagon folding into a body that remembers being numbered. Synchronicity is their table-talk leaking into your afternoon. The Great Work was never a ladder. It was a throw. Solve is the scatter. Coagula is whatever sticks when the bowl stops singing. Gematria in the teeth. A name that adds to the same total as a ship that never landed and a god who never died because dying would end the wager. High, now. Not cheap altitude. The height where probability thins and every small motion writes a law. Your name becomes a coordinate. Mercury rewrites the ledger while a craft hangs unmoving where the old hymns put a chariot. If you hear engines, call them choirs. If you hear choirs, call them engines. If you hear neither, you are already past the language they use to keep you polite. One last instruction spoken into the hollow behind your ear: do not wake to prove this. Wake to spend it. The high lot is still turning in a palm that is not a palm. Shit, even the watchers lean in when the chip stands on its edge. Morning will try to file this under dream. Keep the copper on the tongue anyway. The dice have stopped and the stopped dice are still rolling in a tense no grammar owns. Somewhere a god and a pilot initial the same page. High chance was never a promise. It was the shape of you when the universe admitted it had already chosen.
