CONEY ISLAND GUY

for Lou Reed


“Pass through the fire up ahead,”
One I wanted to be my friend said.

Lou you somehow plugged in to the machine
music for all our dreams, “a bit of magic in
everything, and some loss to even things out.”

When you passed on to the other side I learned
how a person can transmutate themselves
into the expansive essence of the universe. 

For someone who touched so many lives
you’ve filled in the shades of our hearts with
your ghost. You’re there behind every cloud
with your sunglasses on, flown into the Sun

DEAD FRIEND BOOKMARK

for Andrew Thomas Phillips


Artificial lucidity stares back
from the future accomplished. 

Having engineered a hole 
in xeroxed black and white
we peer through just like a window 
pressed between the leaves of a book.

A marker used to keep track 
of our progress and saved 
to escape through once 
the story is done.  

The tome put away on a shelf in a room 
of the basement of a house on the moon.

(A crease in the paper across the bridge 
of the nose underlines the left eye out in 
the dark half of a hypnotic magician's
divided face folded back into the heart) 

You are sorely missed, and the feeling 
we will never meet again intensifies 
because we achieved our past 
set in concrete, and memory 
remains the only portal to  
the future we'll ever know.



SL/C 9/10/15--Five days ago,
you would've been forty-five.
I've found you after all these years.  

OF FEATHERS RELEASED FROM TIPPED SCALES

In our craft a boat is built
Around us which carries us home
On a cradle floating down the river
Coursing through the thicket of our hearts
Pounding in unison at the door of our song
Escaping between the bars of a cage
Fashioned of pure molten nickel iron 
Spun into the flowering gravity bound well
Beyond our electromagnetic capacity to resist

HITCHER HIKED

Serial killer Jack at stroke of midnight party 

Seasoned prayer rope around a tree branch

Mission cruise control wheel-barrowed  

Metric round robins pecking by the sea.    

Order swallowed whole the rarest diamonds  

Upheaval dared to cope with missing teeth 

and tonsils relegated to ululations  

Faded from memory's quietest decree.

That of driving in a new complete direction 
Toward a riot storm of colors shrieking still   
Across the windshields and then catapulted  
Past the final vanquished point to disappear  

Into a gradually collapsed thunder clap

Like an already forgotten whisper in the ear

Hitcher hiked along with us and exulted 

in the trap to which he'd gotten us to steer 

  

GROUND LEVEL

When I lower 
my eyelids
down here 
in the basement

Shutting out this 
city neighbor
hood I can begin 
to hear the wind

Ruffled fur and smell 
the decaying mouse
making no sound 
outside my window

PETALVIEW

The stars— 
captured mayflies 
in crystalline suspension
 —echo their harmonies.

Each  unique instrument
across this spectrum
adds to the symphony
  of the multiverse.

Hearts explode 
within the macroplasm.
  
 Lungs expand and collapse here.

Shadows of  these events 
seen as  grotesque forms  
interplay against the interior
of these lit up circus tents.

  The filaments of rungs 
to which we've clung 
remain as diminishing
 notes ever present. 

  We who are shown clearly 
are now fleeting
  from the point of view 
of the stars 

DROP SEED

Just because I dreamed that I fell off the Earth 
and while I dropped through outer space slung 
shot from our planet's thrall and out to bank 
about the Sun only to be further outward flung 
to drop away from our fuzzy gray Oort Cloud 
and glowing Astrosphere into the spinning 
gravity well of the nearest star system only 
about four light years away from here and 
dried like a mummy on the way only to be 
resurrected on another planet in a drop of 
water doesn't mean it couldn't really happen. 

excerpt from Speed Demon

a short story by Shaun Lawton

SAILBOUND BOOK

How the cry of a gull or the roar of the wind
becomes our story, how we are written into it.
This is how we are drawn into the ocean. 

The odyssey I've fallen into has passed depths
to be measured against the brightness of a dream
and reflected back at me, the haunting image
of my past's alternate selves, one in particular
heading the rest, a forgotten waif, made the best of it,
Pinky's there, in his vest, the rest in their Sunday worst.

The host of forgotten fantasies, to which I toast
a languid goodbye, at the most, drifting along
unheard of among cities on the coast
where the foam of waves whispers my name
in your hoarse voices, so the crash of waves
upon the rocks cries out your names in my own voice
and mingled, our soliloquy melts upon the winds above the sea.

SARDONYX

Point the deathbone
At the moon, anoint
A blue ceramic bowl
With drops of blood

Study the splatters
Of streaking fluids
The way you would
A snowflake or tulips

Enter the cavern of
All of our fears so
We can cast shadows
On Christendom

A patch of leprosy
Grows upon the thigh
Of a virgin while they
Thrive ruining resistance

As the ocean wind on
The sails of a lost
Ship captured by us
With persistence

Turns out to reflect
The worst piracy of
Our lives stared at
In mirrors of our I

MINERAL'S DREAM

A very old tree totters over 
Into the wildwood far away
With a sound approaching 
The memorial of thunder
To its standing survivors
Outspread in their foothold
Through funereal compost
Melding with mossy fungus 
Under the loam of bedrock
Adding another microtone 
To the growing forest song