THE MERCY SEAT

 by Shaun Lawton 

deep inside the scarred heart a viper

    strikes from where the wooly mammoths 

of memory nest in turbulent germination 

  to reach a paroxysm of equilibrium 

the whipping star's fulcrum 

   opens its incandescent kernel 

  to set alight the pilot furnace 

   deep within our abominable dream

while nothing remains as it's seen

  even as the chimera stares back at us

 from the ubiquitous mirror spanning 

the works from vitreous matter to every pupil

  awake in the maelstrom of this sanctuary 

where our mirror neurons collide 

  across the habitat of the vacuum 

under the hypnotic pedipalps  

 the spinnerets of reverie have woven

    splicing together the panopticon

 of our daily ordinary weather 

   stitched in tandem by lightning storms

so lower your eyelids and rest

  while you still can since after that

this gift we have been granted will 

  be replaced by the incessant tempest

    

 

  

iCON

  by Shaun Lawton 

Apple itself is a bite

 taken out of the sky 

     behind the wave
  its outline a mirror

 in which you can see 

  your own pupil
the stem is in the shape 

of an eye canted 

  at an angle
 like a chromatic accent mark

   on some forbidden icon
 with its camera pointed

 double barreled straight 

at you rendering 

  your virtual doppelgänger 

image in reverse
 stored in the cloud 

  for future downloading 

into the matrix
 of the fusion on our 

   post-human streets 

 where we’ll fail

  to remember that it’s really

just ourselves haunting 

these alleyways
with the fading impressions 

of ghosts shuttling  

  by in our cells 

     while a poison moonrise 

    eclipses our long frozen 

  vision to develop 

 our immunity 

to having our dreams 

  turn into hells