Tincture of Spines

 by  Shaun Lawton  

   The quantum evolution of an idea becomes expressed through pixels in fractals of geography reflecting a process analogous to crystallization, except several orders of magnitude below capacity to formalize; in other words, creating at best an effect not unlike the aurora borealis, which is to say a shimmering conglomeration of spectral lights variegating across our own natural rainbow of colors, along with several other harmonic orders of hues refracted from some other unfathomable domain. A mesmerizing mixture of intermingling pigmentation. 

    

    What begins transmuted through the magnetic spectrum of light ultimately leads to the process of crystallization that we have long taken for granted as a beautiful agglomeration, one we love to cut and polish and trade among each other in admiration. These crystals aren't solids at all, but rather light itself caught up at a much slower frequency and vibration. They are nothing less than water's missing link. Together they combine forces to bring about the kaleidoscopic multiverse. Here is the clarified triumvirate which incites flesh and blood to spring into being. 

   A tincture of spines seen through microgravitational lensing, revealing scenery as seen through fables of crystal spheres and palantirs, balanced against a lidless eye in the sky opened wide for all to find, except for the fact that one by one, each one of us in creation remains the one to be found, by the hunter himself known as the possessor of the eye, a primary predator on the primal side. It's the progenitor of all relentless cycles. The author of the auspicious debut. The intrinsic encrypter of codified behavior. 

   And we are the recipients of an eternal code. The messengers carrying the signal. The vessels containing the spiraling cryptogram sent as a cypher from the far end of forever to the nearest available sanctums of truth, to whatever stray receptacles are willing to take the vital information planted within the seed to be distributed throughout the universe. The memetic language of the tongue passing along the orations of the dead from one living generation to the next, a procession of memories handed over in ritualistic solemnity marking the passage of the elders into dust. 

   We are next in line to become the elders of our time. The oldest souls among us remain the youngest in heart and deed, while the newly indoctrinated grow old quick. For all we know, we're saving it up until it turns to dust overnight. With one final lowering crescent blade of the moon in dissolution against the grainy dark rocks along the sea shore. The stars shimmering with their constellations bisected at our feet. We stand in mute deliverance before a late night barren street. 

    Alert eyes wide open awake and walking out under our star, we are all here together on this wandering planet on its course through the universe in time, a carriage to us all on our way forth  toward undertaking the advancement of our very own kind.  May the forces of mercy and strength in our hearts overcome the possession of cruelty and dominion throwing taller shadows upon the land. 

    Approaching a blood red sunset of shadows cast upon a mountain range of towering pinnacles. Thrusting our silhouettes leaning against what's left of the sunlight filtering through like fingers grasping for one last hold on the day.  A day that is slipping away forever, just like all of the days before it and all of the days to come. A tincture of spines we've been given the time to work for us one by one.

     

   

Under a Derelict Star

 by  Shaun Lawton 

   From the very beginning we knew what we'd been programmed to think of the whole sordid affair, having realized the nature of the situation long ago, when anterior portions of the world were being colonized enough that we guarded the idea in the mind's eye reflected against the backdrop of the dream, we kept fixated on it along the road ahead as well as in the rear view mirror, because the dream surrounded us as we moved through it. 

   This dream belonged to us as we did to it and our home became like a dream formed around us, just as the clouds developed so quickly on the event horizon of our minds, to mirror the underside of the sky, with a celestial parade of floating beasts, just riding the wind of time to the ever loving music of all the minutes of the hour in a day. 

   A sweet piping heard from way on out amid the furthest shores, bending over in time toward us, to the most distant portions of the past, half buried in the dim recesses of memory, fading one detached episode from another, each one winking out slowly in the darkness, mirroring all the galaxies we have left behind.

   Until the farthest reaches of  our encroaching dream, the most distant parameters of this endless kingdom, presents the opening to the fortunate labyrinth as it has come to be known, among the very few who have braved enough storms, and survived a sufficient amount of brushes with death, enough to know they are lucky to be counted among the populace of this planet Earth. 

  

    

WHAT WE REALLY RESEMBLE

by  shaun lawton 

                                     photo credit: NASA/IBEX/Adler Planetarium

   Take a deep breath and imagine. Expand your mind to forward it toward the bowshock just beyond the front of our heliosphere as our sun hurtles along its path in the galactic region. To what end the question is begged so that we can pretend this route is an assumption, as if our star could be fixed as a matter of course. More to the point, there could very well be a reason for the Oort cloud's presence and it may have more to do with the universal medium that keeps all our respective existences intact and relative to each other along the undulating moment, humour me here, ha ha get it. The dance of the spectrum compresses the spheres until sparks fly up in molecular chains across the dark. By the time you get to the perimeters of the Oort cloud, you're really just seeing the beginnings of the coral reefs before traveling on over the open sea toward another land that cannot be seen; at least, this is how we've been conditioned to perceive it.   

   Nevermind these thoughts for now. Think ahead past the bowshock of our solar system, and if our own local star to which we appear to be attached by electromagnetic gravitational forces beyond our comprehension is on some odyssey of motion around our galactic core, that seems to be set up to continue for quite some time when considering the scale of our galactic arms. It seems as if we're trapped in a slow motion dance and if the whole of the scale of macro interactions balances a gargantuan equation of unspeakable equilibrium maybe this only begins to reveal that portion of the human psyche we've only begun thinking we're dreaming about in our own personal quest to understand the relation between where our feet are placed upon the ground of this planet and where our heads are lain to rest at night when we go to bed after being well fed on a daily ritual basis we were all born into performing, like it or not. 

   All I'm trying to say is if you really want to get a good look at yourself and what you really are just glimpse at the core of our galaxy and imagine our infinitesimal little solar system as a fleck in the midst of that storm and realize that's your heart mind body and soul right there in the flesh incarnated staring loving living laughing dreaming sleeping waking running sunning shedding dreading getting older apparently faster every year we make a revolution around the Sun like clockwork the entire electromagnetic organism remains as the greater fleshly host comprised of the strewn out processes going from solid to liquid to gas and to plasma. Take a deep breath and let your mind's eye gaze at the stars and see them as individual cells representing one of the cells in your own body, see its as simple as that because all of the stars in the sky are the cells of all of the people on the planet Earth because it's this single planet at the center of the carousel spinning and pressing forward and onward toward the incomprehensible balancing of an equilibrium equation necessary to forge the condition of our own personal manifestation throughout the aether and into the real. 

   It's as simple as realizing that all this time we've mistaken our Earthly bipedal guises here as being the subject of ourselves when in fact our arms were the Milky Way's spirals our eyes were the scattered quasars beyond and our beating heart the mutual whirlpool at the heart of existence itself the great life giving dominant organ of the universe what can only be named inconsequentially with an irreverent gesture meaningless in the face of our newly acquired grasp. We look into the mirror of night and hold our breaths in the highest regard. We remain grateful to the impurities found in our water. We grow roots to be braided into wings. We see what we believe in our dreams. 

PEERING DEEPER

Looking into this matter led me to momentarily believe I was fundamentally shaping the essence of creation itself. With a gradually developing astonishment I realized all my inaction and activities combined to help forge not just my own fate, but that of a whole splinter shard of a world which may have continued without me, but which I'm told would dissipate like so much mist at the moment of my demise. Why would that be? I wondered. If, upon my extraction from holistic events, the world I'd helped shape around me disintegrated as the mass quotidian snake of time continued to engorge on the ever flowing radiation of circumstances winding into the infinite coil, then one could be led to see how a super conductor like that wound up into a pill--a single dose super nova, shall we say--that when popped, goes down like a black hole expanding in your chest. If you know what I mean. If you don't, you really ought to try it sometime. See, it ruined me; but that's not to say you won't manage to walk away from the experience in more or less one piece, a bit ruffled sure, but that goes without saying when your connection to the entire universe has been made crystal clear to you in every sense of the term. Some handle the process and survive it with their minds intact, some don't--they're just never the same person again. There's nothing you or I or anyone else can do about that. No there isn't, and that's because we both know we're all in this together, aren't we. Of course we are. Now we're beginning to get a better sense of the picture. It's coming into focus from the abstract. A continually coiling series of reflective questions, like an unfinished glance still bouncing off a bending hall of mirrors, going around a corner and unfolding as you travel down the twisting corridor of your life, spiraling onward into depths which only seem fathomless, because our predestined arrival may be the only foregone conclusion which has yet to complete itself here, like a sunset sinking into the darkest distant sea, only to pass beyond the roiling waters and sparkle true and lucid blue, as a swallowed gimlet winking out before being hugely swung back around, to come hurling upwards from the darkened other end, only to bring about the warming influence of another dawning sunrise, as the case has always been, and will always continue to be. But I was meant to be ruined, you see. Because the old me, I was so one dimensional. Like an ant walking down a line because someone had carefully aligned sugar crystals along it. Just following dots that weren't even there. It's how we all start off, that's why I'm writing this. While I can still remember that portion of it. We are subject to complete irradiation at all times. It's not a matter of merely opening up one's eyes. It's a matter of breathing evenly and inhaling so deeply that one suddenly makes a connection between the expanding universe and one's own gently in-drawn breath. It has been this group effort which keeps propelling us ever forward as electromagnetically charged particles circling through the pumping bloodstream of what I like to think of as the elemental progenitor itself. A place where within and without have always intertwined. A man must not ask if a bug can dream lest he remain prepared for the answer, I was told by a stranger, at a bus stop in the rain, once. That was a long time ago in a far away place, and today I wonder in what possible manner could it still be tied to me here and now, with my eyes rolled back into my head revealing white under sides as fields of snow slip away backward on the falling crest of the incoming waves crashing down late at night with a cold moon wavering along the reflected racing ribbon haunting the skull lit shore. I drink in the scene with all of my senses. It's just the moon's face reflected in a looking glass, I keep repeating to myself. But it's also so much more when reconstructed after the projected unraveling motion has been wound back up in one's mind. The fading tracers of our satellite's light reveal the eternal winding of a brilliant cocoon whose design has been often confused with a tomb, but whose purpose, I am beginning to grow suspicious now more than ever, much more resembles that of an emerging chrysalis. At least this is what I've been saying. I've been looking into this matter extensively for years. Strangest of all, it appears that the matter has been looking into me. I cannot say I can positively explain the phenomenon to the satisfaction of my reader, but I will try my best. It's that while in the act of looking into things I became oddly conscious that things had been looking into me, except that now it was my turn. Furthermore, I was bothered by the notion that this exchange was one of many, that in fact it was a ritual of sorts, a temporarily ongoing occasion, something committed with as much regularity as the eating of breakfast, at the very least. That's the best that I can describe it. When I'm not fully focused on something, with exacting concentration, then this thing which I suppose may be seen as the remainder of all creation in the universe itself  reverts to its careful and deliberate studying of me, here alone in this singular apartment dwelling in the city. Just another good worker ant in the industrious hive complex, built up alongside the encroaching foothills of the New England coastline. Back in the farthest reaches behind the corner of my mind's eye, I smile and think to myself how I've found the alien inside me who first discovered the human race. I know it now as just another facet of our ever morphing cosmic face.