AETERNUS AEVUM ANALOGIA

by Shaun Lawton

                                    photo by Vincent Daemon

The industry now turning here has been doing so for awhile. 
The mirrored analogy lies in the striations of our smile. 
It appears in genuflections of an ordinary grimace. 
And disappears in the injections of our blood's burning furnace.
Momentary in a slipstream plunged into the intermittent.
Turned inside out from a synapse into another galaxy. 
The trick is understanding that our plasma is our currency.
Space and time itself remain nothing but the flesh and blood of God.
We are just the garment he wears which appears to us very odd. 
That's because we have displaced Him according to his greater plan.
Written in the script of paradox spiraling through modern man. 
Paranoid paranormal paradisaical to the bone.
Steeped in ecstatic tortures infernal divinity our home.
What is truth but loyalty to an ancient handed down notion. 
Faith in the veracity of staying solid firm and steadfast.
Meanwhile knowing all along our own physical bodies won't last. 

Our fidelity to being correct will someday backfire. 
The friction it engenders may lead to our funeral pyre.
This is why we must remember to forget most of the time.
Forgetting to remember always promotes remaining sane. 
The more we memorize the further we clog up our own brain.
In the act of hypnotism we become our own victim.  
Staring into this dark prism we transform our innocence.
Our experience observed by a bright myriad audience. 
Oblivious our isolation stays just an illusion. 
Blind to the rich assembly that exists as an intrusion.
Wearing the stellar mantle a fallen crown upon our head. 
Neglecting the difference between the living and the dead.
While one must disappear from here the other emerges there.
It escapes our understanding that this points to everywhere.
Except when we perceive that time and space are one and the same.

We forget our magnetic interaction with the stars. 
It remains constant between us no matter where we are.
Unbroken and perpetual connected at the core. 
As beyond so beneath we should never mistake our dream.
For something we can't realize existing in between. 
By focusing our vision on the here and now instead. 
Disembodied for a time more or less within our head.
We can learn to recover our lost sense of sanity. 
After tumbling over in this distant proximity. 
Awaken to the furthest always being near at hand.
Remember the one whose eyes open when you close your eyes.
Going north in winter traces our passage from this world. 
Before our lives began here we were under different skies. 
By unclenching our balled fists our blood banners are unfurled.

Everyone alive stands upright their own sentinel. 
Illuminating the current hive like a candle. 
Conducting electricity with our flesh and blood.
Manifesting on the plains of diminishing lands.
Forming this unique chain of a legacy of hands.
Converging on a point parallel to each other. 
Thread the needle through our eye to a long lost mother.
Weave the garment made of skies cloaking our own brother.
Shed the warm hide that was grown such a long time ago. 
Dread the pride that you've shown for not knowing it was so. 
Ever going on this ride that is continual. 
Like snapping shut and picking open a pair of locks.
Without keys we escape the prison of paradox.

Truth has been described as a twi-edged flaming sword.
This depiction remains a lovely metaphor. 
It cuts both ways and also burns down villages.
Those who think it absolute remain adamant.
It scalds and razes those untrained to handle it. 
To see within it we may have to close our eyes.
To know it better we must learn its new disguise.
Overcome that which we're told has been forbidden.
There's nothing wrong with knowledge as information.
The real danger lies in gaining a distinction. 
Thinking we know the difference between right and wrong.
Unravels the harmony of our mutual song. 

Remain steadfast in holding off conviction. 
Trade our ears with another's in dictation. 
Swap our shoes with each other just to listen.
Serve others as you would want to be treated. 
Stare into these mirrors however fleeting. 
This behavior's in accordance with reason. 
Our liberator arrives with the season. 
The protector's concealed within our own skin.
All is revealed when we take time to begin. 
Thinking we've started just because we're awake.
We all share that in common a big mistake. 

The fact is we haven't even begun. 
Our transformation under a new sun. 
There is no reason for us to pretend. 
That every moment we do not transcend.
Although we may be seen as illusion.
Our identities just a confusion. 
Only present without past or future.
To help focus keep up the inversion. 
The blurring at worst doesn't go that far.
Keep looking til you first see the polestar. 

POST-POP DESOLATION

by shaun lawton 

As the tides from space ineluctably draw in and out of our atmosphere.

We are licked and caressed by languorous exhumations from the void.

If we could tune in on that distillation of disconsolate wavelengths.

Ushered into the breathtaking inhalation of the yawning gulfs.

Our focus would sharpen into a lucid high contrast revelation.

As the pores of our skin opened and shut in eyeless observation.

Sensing the crack and tolling of thunder in a woeful intimate proximity.

Realizing the sudden lightning flash equated to the bright days of our life.

Not seeing the fulmination for the electromagnetic spectrum.

In blind recognition of the moment being the body of the beast.

Its tensed musculature comprised of the neural pathways in our brains.

Ready to pounce in an instant on the cusp of the riptides of eternity.

Each sip of our morning coffee a conflagration of silent turbulence.

To mirror and be echoed by the tempest from our coronal solar wind.

For a few short moments with eyes lowered shut in ecstatic concession.

We breathe in the turmoil captured inside the center of the eye of peace.

NOVEL CORONAVIRUS UPDATE

by   shaun  lawton 

In the year of perfect vision a multiplicity of cosmic events

 synchronizes after millennia of constantly adjusting alignments.
At the macroscopic level quasars flare open and irises shut 

 channeling electromagnetic energy to form the birth of galaxies.
Black holes dilate and distribute the thermodynamic cycle 

 of energy maintaining the elemental balance necessary for life.
Deep inside the microscopic quantum realm a myriad blossoming 

 of biodiversity erupts into form to open its eyes and dream.
Cellular colonies of majestic fusion reactors perpetuate 

 the elemental ingredients coalescing and tempering into livid form.
The constant recycling of matter and energy funneled from without 

 and processed within the system continues its onset.
While the godlike lidless eye at the central crux of it all stares sightlessly 

 outward a billion blinking pupils gaze back inward.
At an almost imperceptible level in the programming of the intertwining 

 polynucleotide chains of all life an upgrade is imported.
It's been sent from wherewithout to counterbalance the excess proliferation 

 of the living host's inevitable slow corruption.
It is the biological equivalent of defragging the system 

 appearing as a malady down below despite being the cure from above.
In this counterintuitive realm of existence the individual colonies 

 of sentience must implement the paradox of faith to survive.
Glimpsed through the lens of split-mind objectification 

 all developed species get caught up in the ebb and flow of gravity.
In the heart of the moment the here and now gradually undergoes 

 its cosmic transfiguration into the epic there and then.
We praise the skies in our own ways for an eternity realized 

 in a series of instants while forever disappears into the distance.

SONG OF THE THREADED NEEDLE

by  shaun lawton 

I held a wafer in my hand for over an hour. It was calling to me from in between the craquelure of its salted surface. A minuscule steam lazily sifted from its holes and was sent in erratic directions by an invisible wind with a mind of its own. I began thinking it was generated by a weak or debilitated breathing. But what sort of creature could project its breath from afar and through a cracker no less.

I will enjoy eating this biscuit if only I could get it in to my lips. My hand lay paralyzed in my lap as if nothing could summon my arm up to bring the treat to my mouth. It whispered to me in evaporating traces of steam. You'll never manage to eat me it hissed. All I could do was stare at it helplessly. How it spoke to me I never could have guessed. As mysterious as its remote breathing.

Now I know a banshee is responsible, one that has been trained to throw its voice. They have been known to congregate on the west side of town. When the lower west side was abandoned due to the coronavirus in the pipes being found. It was rumored that not even the rats remained to inherit the alleyways of crumbs. Mysteriously only bats dared to lurk once in awhile in these desolate mazes.

Setting the hissing cracker down on the ground I stepped back and hid in a shadow. I watched as a stray armadillo sauntered over sniffing the ground with a course stubbled snout. It huffed and ruffled its hide while trying to find scraps of food to ingest. When it got to the cracker it inhaled it in a single lunging gulp. This lone creature wandered off with that stale communion wafer on its scaly tongue.

There hasn't been a spare moment for me to mourn fallen mankind. I've only considered the reasons in the wee hours before claiming sleep in the basement of the crumbling mall. I know the population of earth was said to have reached nearly nine billion at the peak crisis point. Before the organism of skins comprising the largest meta organ on any planet this side of the galaxy billowed out as a flag.

It was a vector line for parasitical viruses to exploit the only known resources in this astral lane. By burgeoning their size they were able to link together into a greater fabric, a bacteriological cloak of sorts to haunt the flanks of a rogue planetary body that had grown too heated for its own good. Its tectonic hide broke through with tessellation spines and the music engendered was truly hideous.

It should have served to call and harmonize with its neighboring granular clusters housing the colonization of a carbon based mantle. Instead of hiding the crucial chimerical symbiotic bestiary from the roving magnetoception of wandering stellar vultures, it exposed the interior carbuncles of an endlessly forming tapestry offered to the vicious predatory avians. Picked clean like a tray in space.

As a result the albumenic biome acidified to the point of eliminating any bony skeletal beings from existing under its ululating brilliance. Nothing left but cephalopods and sturdy specimens of jellyfish. The starlight refracted through these dappled rainbow beams along the ocean floor. On the itchy surface of the planet's hide homo sapiens would carry on with its murderous schemes no more.

By a series of mathematical elimination it made sense our species would be whittled down to one. The plague carried itself out in pairs so there was always going to be the possibility of one resistant who would be left without anyone else to pass the virus on to. I know its me because the silence that responds to my calls from the inside is stiller than the quiet splendor of the stars at night.

The fact the constellations no longer twinkle might be attributed to a clarification in the atmosphere. But I think it's because they've finally achieved full fruition into their ultimate formation. My mind's eye has opened its multifaceted prisms and allayed a vision so fantastic as to leave me petrified in its shattering myriad splendor. I've been caught in between the intersections of its reflections' stale mate.

This was to be the end game all along. One sculpture representing the major race designated captured on the surface of a barren planet to be subjected to the galaxy's forlorn song. Now that the harmony of the stellar contractions has diminished to a lull I no longer find it so easy to drift off into sleep. I realize now that's because each planet having hosted a bilateral life was thinned to a piercing shriek.

One thread issued from a pipe hole orifice at a time, held in space, spread out in a spiraling tribulation, representing the finest single line tracing a hologram in outer space that when zoomed in on is revealed to be a double helix configuration of molecules in a simultaneous state of ascension and descending into the baseline foundation of the very apex of visionary thought nailed to the head.

I've crucified the stare of my reflection. I've fallen into my image in the mirror. I'm drowning in the atmosphere of winter. I'm burning up in the ether of a star. I'm swimming down the drain into the melting sun. In eternity we haven't gotten really far. I never once yet have started the process I've begun. That's why the curtain falls only once upon a time. That's why the shield lands upon a dime.

I've drawn out the traces of an adventure. I've only just begun in time. I'm finishing the part about ever after. I find myself still being on the run. If it wasn't for the latest series of disasters I can't be sure I would've had such fun. As the lone piercing wail emitted from this sector goes, around here it's hard to tell how the whole damn operation was done. It's execution formed the memory held onto.

It's how we began thinking the war could be won. It was a matter of convincing the long lost participants to consider the other side of the matter. That a matter of fact couldn't bring the best back, nor the thought about going for a ride. It was all lost in a moment in September. It was all hung out to dry on a line. It was all we could do to remember. That it would all turn out just to be fine.

This thought is nine billion times stronger. This time nine billion times as bright. It makes sense the only one in the audience to attend is one's own son or daughter. We don't pretend to imagine we'd ever be out of this water. We only know the reality of how it's gotten much hotter. It goes to show a symphony of pain and memories. Even if we know they do refer to the legacy of a star fading.

POEM REWOVEN

by  shaun lawton 

Providing a format with which I can render these pages obsolete of blank space.
In order to prise the gemstone from the talons of those to whom we're enslaved.
Into dinosaur chrism on the gleaming plates under the sun most of all laved for.
To provide formulations which may become tender again ages away even if late.
Showing how light reveals stolen battalions for those silent wombs we've craved.
Introducing legion blind and storming through the last open gates we aimed for.
To prize formations in which we must succumb to the woven cages sent our way.
In ordinary schisms it is the chosen battle bastion quickly razor split and halved.
That introduces entities to binding states of complicated thoroughgoing enmity.
Inducted often as sins to be tasted only to attempt escape and get drained again.
Instruments inspect our destiny of tightropes driven away in sun glycerin motes.
Seeking wren notes pinned to the arm of some instructing men sent to be tested.
To cope with an ounce of grit while surviving a rudimentary command of doors.
Opened by dawn's insular gliding while awaiting noteworthies to end all armies.
An insurrection bent on destroying crops with a trounce of ill lit understanding. 
Hopeless over cities having to sever blocks from all such suddenly untied knots.
Having winnowed out of it can't be an option again when learning how to comb.
The fish wed out from our beards as provincial hens transform into clean guests. 
From recourse to providence shining O be a friend in our quests to scar the page.

STORY ENDED

by   shaun  lawton  

Hay fever seizes the accountability of the narrative if the
commentator becomes susceptible to this malady.

Sometimes we live in fear of being forced to tell our stories
under conditions not best for remembering them.

It's a systemic emotion bred and  ritualized into us over the course
of many subsequent generations.

There arrives a point where the terror no longer registers
anymore and so here it comes triggered weakly within.

So that the detonation of silence opens a clustering sky
for a garden from which to hang tears individually.

I don't think it's possible for the story to have ended
really, not here today, nor there tomorrow.

CRYSTAL RADIO

by  Shaun Lawton 

Past the breakdown of the bicameral eye into a jewel dropout.
All the droplets fall as if they were all too happy to do so even.
Without gravity to aid the mutual alignment of all the remaining.
Creatures on Earth each one here exclusively in our own domain.
Sharing our individual universes with each other interlaced.
Repelled embraced unfathomed because it's still going on strong.
This here reality appears as a symphony believe me I've seen it.
And I'm listening to its strange refrains even now as I write this.
The weeping curtain of diamonds falls in loose girdles like rain.
Outside my window just one of many filtered lenses on a chain.
Like a rosary trying to balance its own perspective as it spills.
Through hands caressing its beads to snap taut against the anchor.
Waking up to the chill of morning with every last gem spent.
Look into the crystal and imagine the music emanating from it.

LONG PERIOD COMET

by  Shaun Lawton 

A crucible of knowledge replicates from one man's solitary diary. 
Understandings are innately acquired from over long distances.
Filtered sunlight reflects serene off a series of alternating mirrors.
Nodal torch points of the Matriculation align themselves over time.
Networks of quasars help synchronize active galaxies universewide. 
Paradise arrives before our eyes after colonizing us from the inside. 
Hell breaks out around us when we find ourselves on any lost cause. 
To be found is to realize we are here at the exact center of creation. 
Awakening from the sleep of the dead often triggers disorientation.
The ghostly real world blurs behind our shuttering facade of factories.
With inexplicable rapidity the self replicating planet corrupts into slag.
Fated to become yet another asteroid belt embedded with human DNA.

SONNET FOR THE LIVING

by Shaun Lawton 

Holding hands with the shadows of the dead across the street.
The coolness dissipates from our palms after we meet.
These whispers from the mortuary eaves in our ears.
Longing for us to be joined with them are all we can hear.
Drawn from the supernal hearth of our home the forest of night.
What should be found supernatural and eerie or mysterious.
Is the stability of our own street and how it came to be.
That it bridges across the distance of all the known seasons.
Over all the weathered years of our lives and our neighbors.
What should really awe and terrify us all is the truth.
How did the ground and our feet come to meet after all.
Why have we all arrived to see what's here after all these years.
Caught in the cold void of eternity without a moment's certainty.

COLD FRONT

by  Shaun Lawton 

Apart from cracks on the Formica counter top around the bending 
curve of my eye I can not discern anything through my shot glass. 
The rumblings of a city in dusk seep through the slurry of hushed 
undertones merging stainless steel clinks from glasses slowly stirred. 
In this labyrinth collecting mirrors no one bothers looking at each other 
directly for the point of that was lost long ago with the reflected hosts. 
I sink into the magnified pores of her face held balanced on a stack 
of merging surface edits like a drawn bath displaced by a weary body. 
It's been many revolutions since I can remember springtime 
and for that I should ordinarily feel sadder than the beer ads on the wall. 
Cheerfully I determine that mixing drinks with indentured silverware 
may distract the focus from a certain familiar melody floating by. 
Its coruscating pattern of decaying notes drift along into the distance 
like so many flakes of ash rendered gray as the moon in winter. 
The cracked fields of this lit valley fade before the inland sea evaporates 
into silence here on a world whose name evokes nothing but dirt. 
I'd rather not think about it since my drink became too evenly mixed 
for me to want another sip from the cold inversion boiling outside.

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.    

The Zombie Apocalypse™ Will Not Be Televised

by  Shaun Lawton

I remain indoors with the irredeemably captive.
I see a lot from my room looking out through the window.
Only once did I dare to venture out of the Household.
I have too many chores to do, and besides, we aren't allowed.
To go further than the reinforced gate in the Yard
Is to invite certain persecution from the Federal Guard.
My two older brothers kept grave shift watch at both Towers.
Thomas (the eldest) had reported to me troublesome encounters
During his early morning shifts.  Tom confided in me.

Just before his first zombie kill, his target was pointing
Wildly at its champing mouth, as if it were trying to bite off
Its own index finger.  Yet something in the manner
Of its uninhibited gesticulation troubled my brother.
There was a certain desperation to it, he said.  Whereas the others
That he terminated since then barely managed to stand there
Unaffected by flies.  Walking with the slowest deliberation
In no particular direction.  Utterly indifferent to being crowned
By the glorious skies.  This is what got Tom thinking.

I'll say this about my oldest brother, he always used to claim
That he thought too much.  Now look what it got him.
Outside the Fence, and Lod knows if he were still alive
I wish he would send me a sign.  Apparently he sent it
To our brother Pete, instead.  Peter said, "He's one of them
Now.  I saw him yesterday.  Laid him down myself.
He was doing that thing like he was trying to eat his own finger.
I'm sorry little brother.  He is at peace."
After a long silence, I asked him where it happened.

He pointed to an overgrown street corner two blocks outside the Fence.
After calculating the distance, I explained to him my plan.
During a dark hour of morning, with rope he lowered me to the ground.
From the lone Northwest Tower, I ducked my head and ran fast.
Tom's body lay spread eagle on his back amid a bed of dandelions.
The single conclusion which haunts me, and of which I have no doubt,
With the flashlight I peered into his mouth and found his tongue cut out.
I heard a scraping sound, as if someone approached from nearby.
Like a deer I bolted away, and sprinted wide eyed for the Fence.

At the knotted rope I yanked, the bell in the Tower alerted Peter.
He hauled me to safety even as I climbed away from there.
From the top I looked down and saw the body sprawled arms outspread.
Lying still.  The question burning inside of me that I had just found
I was too scared to actually discover the answer for myself now.
I have a role to play and there are rules to follow, we all do.
I will never leave the sanctity of the Household again.
I see a lot from my window up on the second story.
We remain indoors together, the protected and I.   

La Vida Es Un Sueño

by  Shaun Lawton 

A strange man from a distant land once told me, via a means resembling the subtlest hand theater, evoking strings of an orchestral idea as if by subtly adding veins beneath the flesh, plucking them under one by one, overlaying by degrees and passing over seas through thinning silver clouds, his hands spoke silently with minnowing gestures articulating phrases plainly understood for their universality, which shaped a story in the air about a cloaked and hooded man upon a camel or horse, it wasn't clear, striding for days across the rippled dunes of a half-blown desert, until every night, when they dreamed together in a heap by a depression in the red rock, their being the center of their own dream, each was revealed behind closed eyelids the same titanic body of water awaiting them after many days travel across the shared landscape of the real, and during one early morning while they passed over the blowing sands, the man remembered an old poem which a wizened Spaniard had taught him when he was nine years old.

Life is but a Dream, and there is only one, without a dreamer, for what we are is the dreaming, every one of us being dreamed, and dreaming also but with ourselves the center of our own dream. I dream the universe; all that I dream is I; I who both am and am not as I; and while dreaming the universe, with you perceiving it—you who are not as I but am as I—for we are the dreaming without a dreamer, and there is only one Dream that is life.

“This poem arose from ancient philosophies beyond the east and has been reputed to contain the literal truth as the masters of old came to understand it,” the donkey brayed as they approached the coastline—as if to make fun of the masters or not, the man wasn't quite sure—as they gazed clear eyed through the spray beyond the horizon over the sea shore.

BRIGHTER EYES

Think about it. Think throughout it;
Think within it, think without it:
Most everything you've ever heard
Was from the lips of men.

Most everything you've ever read
Was penned by them alone.
Chances are you yourself are of the race of man.
The chance is great that what I write
You will not understand.
But have no fear, this tale is told
For others who may hold a secret deep inside,
And only they know the truth held within the lie,
And with time and understanding the lie will shed its skin
To free the dormant spirit that incubated long within.
And men will age and not grow wise
And lose this world to brighter eyes.

Legend has it we can see within the darkest cave,
But who has passed the legends down
From in between each grave?
And others claim that some of us have skin as black as night
And spirits that are evil, and hair that is snow white;
Just because they're legends, child,
Doesn't mean they're right.
But don't you weep or lose the shine born within your eyes–
Because they are just legends
You can see through their disguise,
And only you can see the truth hid well behind the lies.
Man will misinterpret everything until he dies.

Remember children, there is nothing that we have to hide,
For man has hidden it from himself
And seeks with vision blind.
So though it may be woven throughout this very verse,
All that man can do is rant and rave and curse
And laugh at all these words and think they are cliched–
While silent and nonplussed, truth shines within arrayed.
For man is just a creature trapped in paradox
While we walk freely through its realms
With the keys to all its locks.
Man is either kept imprisoned within one of two extremes–
And if lucky finds balances so brief they become dreams;
Or he's crushed within the grindstones shifting in between–
While the rest of us just live our dreams
By balancing extremes.

Of course it's true that in a way we can see in the dark;
Just how exactly dark it is becomes the curious part.
Look at them with torches lit, straining to improve sight.
The shadowglares just frighten them
And further mock their plight;
And in this corner of the world
I close my eyes to see the light.
So I suppose it's true, we can see in the dark,
Which they've confused with shadow
And therefore missed the mark.
For shadows throw patches of fear on the walls,
Illusory phantoms that hunt men down halls
And will stalk them forever in labyrinths lost
For the grimmest of fares–sanity's cost.

In a world that is mad and only a dream,
In echoes of sunlight and refractions of scream
We undrown through memory recollecting lost seeds
To harvest an anchor thrown out to the sky;
Motionless branches, remembering trees,
Roots freely breathing in mineral dreams;
Half of this passes straight through his eye
And he thinks he's seeing it all–
The biped has lifted his heart from the earth
Held his head high, and severed the contact
That once used to be a cherished embrace;
Now he's a walker of wastelands, imprisoned
And forced to support the divorce of his race
From his paradise lover as he treads on her face,
Wildly in search of her eyes that erase
As he scuffles and trods up the croplands to waste.

But enough about man, we know his ways.
It's not necessary to see through the haze
Or to smell his pollution and taste the hard rain
Or hear the cacophany and feel all the pain;
It is evident alone from the loss of one thing–
That last unnamed sense called the sixth has been slain;
Or stunted, at best, in the least of the race; or at least
They seem sparse in the worst light of space–
The one that they utilize too far in this place,
To come to decisions to jump at a ghost;
You know the one, suffused and
Diffusing in all concentrations,
Worshipped by many throughout all the nations,
Remembered by few and forgotten by most:
You know, the Sun...our holiest Host...

And this is the reason they have brighter eyes;
They know what they see, they do not disguise
Their bodies’ awareness with fear or with lies.
The stories out told about them aren't distorting
The truth you see, they're replacing it and kid
You're not the only one beginning to get the picture.
Skin that is ebony, blacker than pitch, hair that is whiter
Than wilderness snow, and cruelty that is fabled
Across history you know. The hush of a polar hillside
Holds their secret; if you hold a mirror to their name,
You get the word; if you read between the language
Of their game, you get the meaning. And they never
Stole the holy grail. Pretty soon you know,
They'll be accused of having ripped out people's eyes...!

Think the next time you listen, or read
The carefully cultivated, immaculate lies.
And balance your options, plant your own seeds,
And water the fruit that it breeds.
Tend your own garden and mend your own business
And careful... your steps are on stones
Where their owner feeds, for he has freedom
Of speech and freedom to press your bones
Into a printing machine that spits out
Certificates of ownership–deeds inked with your blood.
We leave our signature every where we've been.
There're signs of us in leaves out there you've seen.

And no matter what you believe, there is something
Outside that harbors us, protects us, loves us, preserves us
And seperates us into enclaves–each deserving its own fate;
Able or not, each to its own ability,
To transgress its own state.
And those whose eyes have drunk of the grail
And seen with vision clear, will fulfill their chosen
Destinies that they have held most dear.
And the rest in the end will be left without fire
While trapped in an endless galaxy...
While brighter eyes, between the frames,
Exist in actualized fantasy!

The moral in this cryptogram is equal to the curse–
It's up to every individual to tell the genuine from the worse
Reflection lost amid a myriad in a labyrinth of mirrors.
Among the countless echoed ghosts
Only one is without error;
Instilled with pure faith, this one hatches in the world
And spreading a cloak out, dissolves into darkness unfurled
Under starlight and coiled up in a cavern
The secret is hidden and learned in reverse
By the few who have made it from the beginning
For whose ears and eyes this story's been told
To dispel all fears and understandings of old.
And though the chances are slim men will comprehend–
Remember, that this was not for them alone penned
And most everything I've written here
I never heard from them.

Think without it, think within it,
Think throughout it, think about it.
For all that they have done without it,
Brighter eyes will never doubt it.

HOUSE OF WINDOWS

It's when you begin noticing the small things that it gets you.
I mean, by that time, you're hooked, as the saying goes.
Snagged is more like it, I guess it's lucky they don't use hooks.
More like being netted, really. Usually happens in larger groups,
the rest get left behind. You know how it is. But then,
it's only a matter of time, isn't it? Isn't there something
about the Grim Reaper carrying an hour glass? I don't know.
If not, there should be...huh. Maybe Father Time is the Grim Reaper,
maybe they're one and the same. All I know is what I saw
when I finally took that walk around my block.
Well I guess I only been here three and a half months,
and it was winter when I moved in. I always do get restless
after the Ides of March. I went for a walk out under the platinum clouds.
It was just on the verge of raining, but somehow I knew it wouldn't.
It's a nice, quiet neighborhood. Lotta elm trees.
I hooked a left at the first corner. As the concrete sidewalk panels
flowed under my feet, I looked down and noticed first a few,
then dozens more furry gray caterpillar looking things.
As I stepped carefully to avoid crushing them,
I noticed what appeared to be small, lamprey-like suckermouths
of a darker brown which they anchored themselves to the sidewalk with.
They were all in an inchworm position, a whole fleet
of suckermouthed fuzzy gray caterpillars clinging to the sidewalk,
as if against the wind. After a few more strategic strides
they were gone, and I kept walking. I looked down to make sure
none were clinging to the cuffs of my pants. All clear.
I felt relief. The thought of them bothered me.
I did not discover any more such clusters throughout the neighborhood,
that day. Nor have I ever encountered any since.

PLASTIC OWL EFFIGY

We discovered the entrance to a universe halfway up a hiking trail.
We were exploring one of the canyons along the mountain range nearby.
We've made it a ritual every winter to hike up the trails after dark.
There is no one else to bother us or get in our way sledding back down.
A blanket of snow is draped across everything in gleaming silence.
Sticking to the well packed path is necessary to prevent sinking too deep.
We drag our sleds behind us as we wind up the trail with light sticks.
Placing them carefully at bends in the path as markers, little glow posts.
Facing our mortality in the winds of night on a mountainside is a blast.
Sharing the forest with night creatures reminds us of our relationship.
Our relationship to the occult sky and the starpoints spread out above.
The kinship felt with the wind answers the question where do we roam?
Anywhere we please so long as we can carry our hearts and eyes along.
Off a bend in the path about a half mile up the trail we spotted an owl.
It was up on a branch in the half gloom, starlight reflected off its eyes.
Unblinking it regarded us in what some would consider a baleful stare.
As birds have always been our spirit guides, we knew better than this.
Owls in particular are indicators of portentous probability, to us.
This one proved to be something more as it flew away through the gloom.
It looked back over its feathered shoulder at us indicating we should follow.
Its aerial path took it between older trees deeper into the sighing forest.
Having been literally born for exploration of the unknown, we followed.
The ticking forest welcomed us into its embrace. We left our sleds behind.
That owl led us back to the city and is now perched over our front door.
It turned into a hollow plastic effigy filled with smooth rounded stones.
It fools petty scavenger birds from swooping into our yard for scraps.
The sleds were recovered and now hang in the garage, warped with time.
The ringing laughter cascading in our yard brings echoes of this memory.
Our children are forbidden from ever exploring the mountain after dark.
We simply want to prolong their time with us here in our heart.