Circumventing the Nexus

 by Shaun Lawton 

   As the electromagnetic event unfolds along the spatial coordinates 

of the axes humankind is most attuned to, ripples in realtime expand outward, 

often at the same time and never in sync. Despite all the old stories having been lost, 

somehow from deep within their forgotten lore, diamonds emerge that stick in the memory 

of all who behold them. These gem points are more like moments in time, separated 

by annihilating whirlpools and casting their solitary light upon these shifting battlefields 

as one single shadow leaning into the setting sun. An array of eyelets letting in the light, 

pinholes in a shroud draped over the world. The inner organs of the super attenuated manifestations 

of light reveal themselves after having performed their function, in a sort of turned-inside-out array 

of spatial configuration set above us all as if we are upon the dot of the very punctuation mark 

we dare question. Simply step up onto the podium to ask and watch the world retreat around you,

hiss the whispers echoing in the wind. Such it has always been since the mind like men's be questioned. Such it will always be to see thine self in the same  mirrored reflection. We travel forward hoping to circumvent the nexus left in the wake of our predecessors who hoped we would not awaken. 

We move along the timeline with eyes wide open looking forward to score a token of appreciation 

for the path we have taken. We walk in electromagnetic harmony with the conductor and reactor 

after dreaming in a state of suspension in slumber. We circumvent the nexus even as it helps correct us. 

transfigurement

 by shaun lawton

 dysmorphalize into shapeless blobs  

faceting

     in

            to forming

Sweet Premonition

by  Shaun Lawton  

   Yesterday while at work I went into this rhetorical rhapsody, when I expressed to a couple of coworkers, how nice it would to be a multi-millionaire or billionaire, which brought about my rumination over the classic question, would you rather be rich & miserable or poor & happy, to which I quickly added, my dream is to be rich & happy, and isn't it true they say if you go after your dream with enough diligence, it will come true?  

    I then went on to explain how I could cash out one million dollars in bundled $100 bills, stuff 'em in a gym bag just like in the movies, and then go around handing out wads of cash to people.  If  I were to divide one million between eighteen transporters on my team, they'd each receive $55,555.55.   I could do this every year, cash out a cool million, and focus on a different group of people.  I'd start with my family, of course, then each year work outwards to friends, coworkers, and by the third or fourth year, going out in the street, until I described how fun it would be to get up on top of the roof of a city building and just let the hundred dollar bills scatter on the wind, down into the street below. 

   Was this a premonition of the movie my wife & I then watched on NETFLIX that very night?  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a short 45 min film directed by Wes Anderson and starring Benedict Cumberbatch based on a tale by Roald Dahl.  There's a scene in the film where Henry Sugar, the titular hero of the story, does exactly what I vividly described earlier in the day.  He begins throwing money off his porch down to the street below, causing a bit of a ruckus while people scream and shove to grab the cash with their hands.  

   My dream has always been to be happy.  I've dreamed of being a famous author, poet, even movie director before in my life.  Mostly I've dreamed of remaining an A-class poet.  I don't know if deep inside me something recognizes that if you dream of more than one thing (for example, "being happy and rich"), that you might be asking for too much.  

   Of course my ultimate realization is that I am already rich.  I own a house, have a beautiful wife and son, have been working happily and successfully as a supervisor in the radiology department of a major hospital for the past sixteen years.  I don't earn a salary, but rather get paid a decent hourly wage, which on occasion I get paid overtime when covering extra shifts as needed.  My online networking with social media has been going strong for bordering on twenty years, and I have a widespread connection with at least one hundred successful authors.  I've befriended a few of my favorite writers, and have kept my labor of love the Freezine of Fantasy and Science Fiction going as an open forum blog for fourteen years now.  

    My mom is eighty years old and going healthy and strong, despite or because of the roster of typical medications someone of her age are on, blood thinners etc. Her vitality and energy and drive are things I obviously inherited from her, genetically, and she's happily married to her 3rd husband going on 28 years now.  We are blessed in this life in far more ways than we might ordinarily stop to consider. I am so thankful for not only having a dream in my heart since I was a teenager, but that the flame that keeps it kindled is going stronger than ever after all these years, despite the string of hardships and tragedies that lie behind me in my wake.  I'm grateful for having kept an open mind enough my whole life to not really double down on any given conviction concerning our reality, divinity, or any other such matters. 

    My personal relationship with the universe appears to remain sustained and centered from the vantagepoint of knowing we exist here on Earth in this singular oasis amid oceans of time our minds cannot fully fathom.  I'm indebted to all my teachers and friends and family for their guidance and for showing me support by acknowledging my existence.  I have discovered my own way of refraining from absolute conclusions enough to cultivate my capacity to believe anything in the face of a world growing and changing so fast as to keep anyone's head spinning from it all.  By grounding myself as an agnostic, I have created an eye in the storm, and balanced my ability to keep the chaos just beyond arm's reach.  From this neutral cockpit I've allowed my life to be directed. Praise be to the lack of void and the void from which this lack of it lasts.  

    

Kaleidoscope Dissection

 by Shaun Lawton  

From behind the porcelain façade, the world's face cracks like a teacup

  while shifting through variant accelerations 

as an ever morphing sculpture setting in the sudden heat of the cosmic

kiln dictating the mask worn in the universal moment. This is not an illustration.

   One planetary eye swivels in polar magnetic attraction to focus afar 

while others roll in their orbital sockets as translucent veils of the lid lower

  like sunsets on the distant horizons of some as yet undiscovered exoplanets. 

     The netting cuts through like a sieve of carnality in a kinescopic anatomization 

    here, while the nebulous process, having given kinetic birth to astral wombs, 

   then forges itself in the ardent seizure of possession at the conjugal germination 

  junction mirrored against the unapproachable vortex, thus causing the illusion 

 we glimpse today through the ever advancing magnifying lenses we develop.

    While the holographic interface manages to come into focus, we end up running

      down a dream with an ebbing battery charge of diminishing returns sealed up

     vacuum tight in ceremonial urns lined up along an axis of matrices rotating 

    at a right angle to the differential of an inherently reversible process 

   giving witness to the birth of entropy and eternity's periodic sacrifice.

  

  

INFINITE TURN

by Shaun Lawton 

dedicated to Azsacra Zarathustra 

 I'd like to study the figure of the After Map   It's various Etchings in Darkness

The trap itself drawn into the pillow  A deck and island of border teeth

Death with holes for the eyes and nostrils   Of the head on the side under the calm 

Harbor waves trapped by having secrets    In the dark hidden to Different Memories

With his sons on every border   Point of Anti driven from Matter

In the future the Fear of Flight renewed   Whose verses dictate the Law

Unchangeable in the eyes of God   Whispered genius to the ears of man

So can another Dream a powerful Boy    With every Heart in the Cage that binds us

Under a huge Hypnotic Spell introduced    By the first of the Commonwealth

Directly indeed into the Kingdom Under  Of these she is exact to the Lips

The pieces that break all in Likeness  They take it and examine it

Alone on the Shores of the Heart   A Brother left by a man Forsaken   

With two claws by the spring    Of which the shuttle was loaded

For it is found to go across the Ink Wave   Surface thoughts switch the Oldest Game 

On the shelves because Pain of the Eyelids  In the Cold of the Night  

Which is what all Armies hold that always look to the Stars 

    

 

Incepcionitus Memoradium

 by  Shaun Lawton 

   Had I known the power contained in that one leafy green plant, it all may have turned out differently. I try not to think of such things, because who's to know at which twist a multiplicity of gains may have outdone whatever losses were crossed on other timelines.   

    Even my power of recollection begins to blur sometimes in my mind, as I can only see so far back into my memories in time.  Some come slowly swarming toward me as if released from a great forgotten depth.  The faces they wear always seem like strangers to me. 

    I remember planting the seed, but I can't seem to recall where or when I got the seed in the first place.  I planted it in a brass spittoons' interior, and inserted the spittoon in a white plastic bag.  Two shoots sprouted out of it within twenty-four hours. One ended in a broad leaf pointed straight upwards. 

 

     See, I had encountered a diagram on a tattered, yellowing page in this old fashioned hard bound book I discovered in my grandfather's root cellar.  It was a special place I used to like to crawl into when I was a child. It had a dirt floor that extended up and out to underneath the planks of the front porch.

    I loved to hunker down there whenever anyone else in the family was standing or sitting out on the front porch.  Not because I needed to spy on them, nor did they ever talk or reveal their secrets anyhow, it was just a nice feeling knowing I was right there near them, without their awareness.  

   It was a comforting feeling that I've come to understand only after a lifetime of several decades lived, across a span of living in different states and over the course of several jobs. The first vestiges of feeling comfortable with the dead. 

   

   

For an Interponat

by Shaun Lawton

 for   Sigmar Fricke 

while the murmur and susurration of insects

 gets sucked into endless loops of bubbling bogs

in silence like a deadly snapping flower 

a mechanical garrote or a poisonous love me not 

 in an instant drop dead memetics sunk under 

surfaces plumbed the depths so long ago some have

 floated back belly up pale enough to blind the moon  

  if digression is the art of the game we're one step ahead

 already having slid along on a synthetic lubricant

channeled backwards in time through a loop of constant

  refractory loosening that is to say tightened into focus

on the other side which - and here's the trick - exists 

 along with us indistinguishable from what we know

  already to be drowned in the static of cellophane wrap 

  

Image Hyper Lynx 2 Source Text

 

Your Rights™

this abduction blanket

  is for your security

 your signature will

not be required

    being there

 will be sufficient

digital identification

  performed by the cloud

 encrypted verification

results guaranteed

Analog Loco Motion

 words and images by    shaun   lawton   

 Dipping  the paddle  of an oar  into  the waters of life  

will direct the course taken  going forward  

when the sculling is a letter and  the oar a sort of mail  

 then you trace  the feather of a bird  line by line  

one at a time  on  a blank page  and sign  it 

with your name (not upon the dotted line) 

but  just right there on the empty page   

you control the direction and flow your life takes. 

 

It's  a sort  of  loco motion analytical devotion 

in proximity to the inanimate enemy

 ready to instigate any second guessing 

as best as the next one that is if you ever 

make it back to shore where the waters

of your other life direct the sequence undergone

to continue roving forward in a straight line.

Nothing can parallel your own foot 

becoming a common postal service item

and with the lining of an avian coat of armor

piecemeal assembling itself on the white sheet

upon which the new signature may be applied

onto the marginal cloudscape developing 

as the parallax of our remaining event horizon

helps keep it fixed in perpetual proximity just out of reach.  

      

 

   the remotest miniscule spinning pinpoint eyelet

 pore in the great stretched out skin counts 

as a window into this world an entry place

 to some an exit to others.