Fishmas Tree

 

Dream and Day

The difference between a star and the Sun.
All of them are long gone dead except one.
Even the nearest ones just out of our reach
are on the fast track slipping into death's lane.
Just behind us in line it will be our turn next. 
On whose shores will the echoes of our radiance
appear upon and on the surface of whose eyes
will the image of our light continue to shine? 

But what if we could teleport in an instant 
to any distant star and see through the eyes
of each other? Receive the impressions of who
we are and what we each feel and experience.
No matter how strange and far it may seem
we have nothing to really fear past the fence 
except our own expectation of willful ignorance.
The sun comprises nearly 99 percent of the mass
of the total solar system covering a terrain 
that is an astonishing distance from the Sun. 

     Amid sinister hissing whispers heard in the gloaming under the lunar tides of night did I step as quietly as I could manage into the small grove of slender trees isolated up the trail of the canyon.
The moonlit glare cast a feeling of cold foreboding on the scene. It enhanced the idea we weren't even there. Since we couldn't see ourselves, and there was no one else around to be seen, we were the ghosts. This apparent truth never becomes fully realized until the day we die.

     That is the day we first begin to become just a memory of a ghost. There's nothing left to haunt us after that. This is the hardest lesson to remember. We can only ever do the haunting while we're alive. Human beings alive and well are the very definition of a ghost. There's no one left to remember them. Being haunted is just getting reminded you were once alive yourself. If you have a thought you are being haunted.

     These words represent the thinking of a dead person. They are haunting you in a state of full blown possession. The only known effective exorcism is to stop reading this. By then of course, it is far too late. The human mind absorbs the memory of what it has read. Such is the power of language and the shape of words. Weaving a binding spell on generations of readers. Sustaining a symphonic crescendo due to break on the rocks of twilight any day now.

     The hooting of an owl in the dark recesses emerged spookily from the shadows of the looming forest. For the first time I recognized it as an invitation or a request to step forth and enter its domain. The twinned image of the moon reflected in both of its wide open eyes.

Cross-hairs on the Angel

art and story by shaun lawton 

The Blue-bell of riddling bays, the facial ponds of Straven Avenue, the bird nest under the magnifying lens, lurking on the beach beneath the Caribbean winds. Focusing on a memory quite beyond the ultraviolet. Stepping down the stacked stairs of water down the well. In rapturous memoriam. Reflection of a harlot. Cross-hairs on an angel. Getting erased by the violet dusk with the sun's own rays. Dissolving one granule at a time into the end of days. 

 Drowning under the sands of eternity. Glimmering under a blanket of haze. Breathing in another aqua marine dream. Granted passage by the agents of echo location. Enshrined by the ceremony of forgotten birds. Preserved for a very long time under the pitiless gaze of the shunned indigenous council of solitary beings. Captured under glass for posterity in a glossy full color photograph taken by the panopticon with a series of long since fallen apart cameras.