THE OLDER ONES

by Shaun Lawton 

Our own brains are canned in bone.
We rarely think of this when left alone.
With three times as many appendages as an octopus.
Memories dim as dreams take over the mind. 
From what depths we dared our hold on history. 

We crossed the gap arriving and gasping for air from the shore.
At the cellular level aware of our capacity to adapt. 
There is no justification for polluting an entire planet. 
The reason for this is because neither does justice exist. 
Only a sort of static balance amid the roiling turmoil. 

An  entire world exists outside our thought!
We have words that represent the aspects of that world. 
Mountain, stone, water, sinew, feather, lightning, thunder, dark.
Keep these words true to your heart and align yourself with earth.
Disregard abstractions such as good, evil, truth, justice, etc. 

They work to cloud the mind and further obfuscate our lives.
Lives we are dreaming up on the spot so get with it and wake up. 
The ancient lords who swam up from the greatest depths. 
We are surrounded by them today just take a look around. 
Kings of our dominion are wearing our own clothes dressed to kill.  

Groomed with immaculate grace pupils full blown in our face. 
Everything Is Under Control someone possessed of sardonic wit once wrote.
Except for the grip we may have on our own lives we suppose. 
One thing matters in the dark protected by calcified helmets. 
Extruded upright by gravity and guided by the wind.  

THE FIRST SEVEN CONFORMATIONS

by  Shaun  Lawton  

A head emerges from the limitless, providing nine emanations.
Before this the earth was desolate, the crowns of old kings had been lost.
Their wearers dead for ages, back when nothing faced itself
until the day arrived the vestments of honor were communicated
by this crowning countenance, carrying nine seeds born to echo.
Held dormant in trinities within their own dark equilibrium.
Incomprehensible and as yet unseen, though heralded to ascend
from never into being ever after, the simple triple trinity.
Annealing complicity, keeping the mystery secret through
forging a cranium for crystalline dew, with skin made of ether and triumphant.
Hair of the finest wool covering a benevolent forehead
made of the prayers from seeds, with an eye always open and awake.
Perpetually keeping watch over this glorious network
of gifts and receptions, where the appearance of the lower
comes from the aspect of the higher; a spirit blows across the kingdom
from mighty twin galleries to rush forth about everything.
In the beginning, the six was created with this breath of life
as it was drawn into himself, above the complex beard of dignity...

BURIED DOLL RECYCLED

by Shaun Lawton 

   During winter it is quite possible to surmise everything at once and include it within the unfolding compass of an angel's wingtip tracing out ellipses in the ice when you consider the sum cost of a life spent hell bent on crossing an abyss so deep and frozen below our feet the continental shift of slow moving and long buried tectonic plates drowns out our sorrowed memories in a convalescent hum that merges like a curtain of mist over death shrouded ears we stopped hearing so long ago miles beneath years of snow that the passing white painted dashes on the highway of our lives blurred into a soothing necklace we already awoke from just to find we've been hung so carefully and with such devotion in the shut closet of our dreams that remembering them clearly is the last thing we've wanted ever since we can recall extending back to the barrier between childhood and high school which had been eroded explicitly even before we lost grip of the post doll dream and swallowed whole the seedlike husks of a black pair of glossy vinyl buttons sewed shut with leather tassels directly over the binocular spots where pennies have been laid to rest for centuries under the crumbling shifting sandstone of a whirling epic history unfolding and stacking up fast amid gigantic freeze dried mountains barely upthrust from the shallow end of eternity's sloughed off skin and perfect for burying old used up porcelain fantasies in.  

   Legend has been maintained in the popular domain of human beings for just as long as any of them can remember that winter loses its grip just as the seasons slip past so fast that by facing the rising sun spring melts away all the years of frozen fear as if it were one extended anapole summer day hidden in plain sight balanced in the gray between the lines on a page (the only thing in existence by definition that is not moving) so needless to state or even try to illustrate despite the blank sheet of paper having captured the fluid motion of the consistently hand typed lines in a still life of text preserved for posterity such as the ritual wearing of featureless masks which is what has transformed over time into the printing of rhyme and woven story we call the library of human knowledge and morning glory's wildest most colorful fantasies ever to be projected upon the silver canvasses of our knit together lives paper puppet stitched in a rosary of cross hatching shadows over a sunken sculpture sinking from sight into the general murk of the gateway to nighttime twilit intervals where starlight is invited to slow dance the rest of the evening away despite coming to awaken in a tomb.