Ascendant

 by shaun lawton

 In the haunting effigy of a thread 

storm the arrow upward perseveres 

   the imprint of its moldering corrosion 

remains like a solitary sentinel 

 shrouded in the unraveling mists of morning 

getting unwoven in the wind 

  while the final configurations matriculate

 in the atmosphere of time

chimericalibrarial

phantasticulariattack 

 articulationalgeneration

searingcraftedworkmanship 

articuratelevisionary

 generatrivializensationalism 

craftsmanshipmentarianimalicious

 effortlessnecesitiers

downslopedalinguisterious  

The Tale of Time

by Shaun Lawton

  You are a cipher in an alphabet

One letter itself comprised of an entire alphabet

It takes an alphabet outright to compose one singular   figure you who are only one character in a word  

  The ideograms streaming through you 

also produce a word with you

just as they eventually generate a phrase with you 

and render you into a sentence

  The syllabary running through your genetic code

 also makes you into a complete paragraph

  This takes at least a decade

    as your story is being woven 

       around the loom of the Sun

  After two decades you may grow into your own story

A very short story perhaps only a couple of paragraphs long

  but not without its own punch line 

  By the time we each reach adulthood we are living examples of a sort of flash fiction  

After a good and long life say double that then we'll transform into a short story or novella

   If we double that and live into our eighties 

  we'll metamorphose at long last 

    into living novelties 

      of flesh and blood

  When we die the book that became ourselves will dissolve in the earth having been reduced to the ash of a single character shed like so much snakeskin from this living alphabet 

  The Omega transubstantiates back into the Alpha

     And so it goes an ever cycling process channeled through 

    the subatomic forces at the heart of the universe 

  which dictate the second law of thermodynamics 

and bring about everything from an endless series 

  of big bangs right on down to this very moment 

    where I already having lived long enough 

   to have developed into a novella of living information

 have been led  to transcribe these thoughts here to you      

like shadows onto the screens of your mind 

  You like me each one of us a single letter symbol word sentence paragraph in fact now many pages of a developing collection of stories interacting with each other in the most complex anthology  that has yet been written in blood upon all of the pages of flesh and bone

    Each one of us a chapter describing every permutation 

  of the one story that's been told since before the title 

of The Tale of Time was established as the heading 

  for this account having captured in monograms 

   of the alphabet this single letter composed 

outright as a page for you who are only one character

 in a world being spelled out by each one of us 

   one singular mark at a time

  

 

LETTERS

Have been 
arriving in 
measured 
doses through
out our lives
very much like 
ourselves yes 
characters sent
out so you see
the stories told
about us went
viral over time

THE SHIP: 1st Impressions of the new ENO song

As The Ship began streaming from my PC speakers the first thing I thought of was glass. A filament beneath fogged glass. A filament beneath fogged glass lighting up slowly. The light going from warm yellow toward white and then blending through the spectrum. The glass clarifies then liquefies then disappears altogether, leaving just the light to wallow in the vacuum. Pin pricks allow echoes to flower in the darkness. Deep below decks an engine switches on, muffled by steam engines behind sound proofed glass. The lights dance through the bricks of green glass slowly as more sounds come alive.  A symphony wakes up from its coma to gradually stretch out and yawn. The Ship was sprung from a willing land. Echoes of gaseous vapors steam off the surface of a crystal sea. And there's a globe of powdered sand. We live in clothes we wore. Air bubbles elongate as they plummet and drown. The Time is still. The Sky is young. Drawn on towards the gulf of stars whispering. And we are as the undescribed. Reverberations coalesce into an uprising. A voice through a vibraphone speaks. Distant percussion keeps time. My desert in a grain of sand. My life within a day. So stew the storms that some tied. The black plague is sitting. But we are as the undefined. Reeking of the wind. Whispers begin emanating underneath the skin. Shimmering Cymbeline trapped beneath quiet ice. The sail is down the wind is gone. The sky is black with mold. A slave to hope and destiny. Illusion of control. And we are as the unrefined. The waves about us roll. Spearheaded echos of crystal arrowheads repeatedly diminish triggering smaller fishes of their reflections. Awash in ambient protocols diffused in all directions. Sonar tones arise and sink. Submersibles arrive guided by phosphorescent headlamps. Deeper we go while more voices grow, probing our innermost thoughts. Penetrating the sunken canyons in our little dreadnoughts. The spotlights search left and right, revealing all the whispers in bone. The water is more like marrow here. Our thoughts are all we own. Memories ping and rebound off the inner rubber of our skulls. The pressure stretches these interlocking seams. Even deeper we fall further into fissures transformed to trenches. Microorganisms streaming by our windshield. The vibrations of our tectonic crust. Submerged under wave after wave after wave after wave. The last gossip gradually drowns in our skulls as the final light arrives to wink completely out. 

Wry Reminders

on another elevated

matter altogether
there's yet another
altogether unutterable
and insufferable
period of remembrance
nobody seems to 
be able to agree on
one way or another

so why bother
to worry about
whether you can
summon the memory
from a muddled realm
of stored mundanity
concretized into
a stronghold of
reinforced insanity
or recall it correctly
until all is thought
and forgotten

when you can run
with your own story
building in your head
from the things that
you remember and
what it was you said

Parting Kiss

an ocean's edge
tip toes along feeling
about for a place to 
rest here, sanctuary
to be kept accessible 
until the next wave
laps up to shore