Did You This That

Never got a letter back, more fool me.
Counting on the ginger root getting back to sea.
Having followed the Silk Road for many a mile.
Got a caterwauling holler at a cost
Not representing my last dollar

Limits of Vision

This restriction of perceiving ourselves as bipedal

beings with a split brain and only two hands
hominids loping along to score our next medal
thinking we're winning and conquering lands

What are we overthrowing if not our own sense
of real objectivity and knowing the difference
between seeing and believing that anything's real
like the pores in our skin or the craters of the moon

How may we secure our newfound perspective
If we don't keep in mind that later or soon
enough our misguided sense of directive
could use further adjustment to better attune

Ourselves to the notion we're part of a picture
much greater than anything we might imagine
if we just let go of our own patented scripture
the authenticity remaining we could examine

How strange to think that whatever is evident
May require faith to believe in due to its size
That our individual selves here as a resident
Remain a fraction of a colony of cells in our eyes

Westerner

  Back in tharm days, knob stirrups had it, they flocked rocks out on the plains. 

  The way I under heard it, twas sketchin' swor'n uppin' downy ken, thin reavers 

of the road ripped 'em. Plain shavings left to crumble with the passage of wheels

 in times to come. Red demon Sun inflamed and chasing us ever since one down the long 

stretched out shadows of the soul. So long as the whole planet keeps rolling, 

we gone stay on the ball, on the dark wrapped up path hidden behind sleep. 

   Our lurking black projections sliding tall and winding up into a darker ball 

of memories to disappear amid a crowd of stars. The cool morning breeze

 blows in the scent of licorice and lemon trees. A camp fire crackles from dusk 

until dawn. Its red embers render faint echoing old messages between constellations. 

 A Western poem's sidled up and been hitched to a post. 

   From here ya can't be goin' too far.

Picture

Sandwiched between smoldering onionskin tissues
favor it outstripping most topical issues
did you think for a second he still had it in him
were you carried away on the still running current

Could the dream begin wavering before evaporation
was that merely an overlaid fading apparition
had they really controlled our lives by attrition
does the fossil fuel industry fart in the wind

Focus on what's before us before the distraction
becomes magnified leading to the subtraction
of all that's important in most of our lives
peace on earth for our children and wives

Go ahead and picture a river of time
in a valley then try to see clearer
the terrain through clouds thinning
and the sheen of just winning

To understand one's self
first one must understand others
because when we look through someone
else's eyes we begin to see the whole picture

happen to visualise

The parameters of what we're doing here.
  It's a circumlocution to bring about the rejuvenated
oxygenation back around again in more or less constant
 circulation.  Some of the regulars come and go,
but the few individuals who stood out were never seen again.
  That's the way the miracle works. 

Happen To Travel To Istanbul?

I believe this painting was done on the final day of December, 1855.   Strange that I had already decided in my mind that it would be the perfect visual representation of starting off the New Year. It simultaneously displays a yearning for the beckoning call to adventure which always leads to unknown destinations far and wide, as well as illustrating that exotic port of call we may already happen to be in, our destination.

I mean to say our current location--itself the destination of our previous journey which got us here. If you think about it, a date such as the final one tacked onto the final month of the year, well that can be a lonely place if everyone just passes through without seeming to even want to recall the good times that passed before. Sure, every day could be considered to exist in that rarefied state, so why not start at the beginning, on January 1.

It's as good a date as any, and at least in my corner of the globe, better than most considering it's the frozen dead of winter. What better place to begin a new journey than here and now? Or better yet, forget the phantasmic here--where we're each respectively at is a given--and merely think of one thing: the now. After all, it's all there really is.

If Time remains all that matters, and I can reassure you that is quite certainly the case, all that matters will remain in time, as in the babbling of clarified brooks and the sussuration of insects, the flapping of bat wings or the thrumming of hummingbirds, the soft plastic hammering of keypad buttons or the scritching and scratching of pens upon notebooks.

It is marked daily with the rising of the Sun.With the added perspective of distance, the seasons begin to fall into focus as features of a face. I don't mean the painting, I mean what it manages to capture with such lucid clarity, time itself embodied.

Thanks to the painter, Ivan Ivazovsky for having the dedication to realize this wonderful vision, "View of Constantinople and the Bosphorus," whose copyright remains in the public domain both abroad and here in the United States. Let this image serve us as a reminder. The nearest port of call may lie under our feet, and the horizon always lies waiting just beyond the setting Sun, beckoning for us to resolve ourselves to undergo another journey out into the wild blue yonder. Perhaps we'll meet each other in Istanbul.

Shaun Lawton 

Wondering

Did you ever realize that our planet exists...
That we seceded from the union of oblivion?

Did you ever realize our forefathers established
the world we now actually live in on Earth?

Did you ever read Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo
or do you like Stanley Kubrick's movies?

Ever see his follow up to A Clockwork Orange
the movie Barry Lyndon starring Ryan O'neal?

Have you seen the silent film classic
The Man Who Laughs, starring Conrad Veidt?

Do you think the peerage of England,
as reflected upon in the pages of our history

as well as those of the world's greatest novelists
is something to be considered as having been real?

The real question remains, do you believe it still exists?
Peer into this, seer and tell us whose reflection you see.