Circumspeculated

  a memoir in ten parts   by   shaun lawton 

  in our house growing up we never kill 

crickets its considered bad luck

 today there are legion who wont harm

 a spider and will carry them outside

 to freedom theyve no idea the order

 of Aranea keeps us under its thrall

 

But I am here to tell you we are prisoners 

within its walls wondering about the turn

 of events we are all bound up together

 

Some think time to be an illusion

 they are not even close face it reality

 is the illusion it makes no difference

Since we each create our own reality 

these all become compounded together 

and while we revel in the experience 

sharing the moment our throbbing 

collective species should not be 

considered an organism but rather

 more like a gathering storm

and every storm runs out of rain

   

  In our house nestled amid the mist 

wreathed pines of the Carbonales Valley

 I had an owl named Zachary and two ocelots

Sir Ivanhoe & Lancelot I even had a deer

 Bambi but alas A pack of starved feral dogs

all formerly domesticated breeds like Shepherds 

and Cocker Spaniels fell in after dark and ripped 

the deer family apart I remember the large 

black tarantulas that would creep out from under

 floor boards and doors I am done writing  

to enrich the fortunes of no one the only living

 nutrients breathed into the universe remain our own

broken down components long fated to decompose

 into the compost heap of an ever thriving history 

mystery her story your story its all the same damn story  

  

We each grew up in a spaghetti can tossed aside from the window 

of a moving van speeding up as it approaches the green lights 

nevermind the analogies were being ushered into 

a new century now its more important than ever to try 

and wake up to civic duty and heres the catch if we dont 

do it ourselves no one will In our house out in the woods

 along the mountainside amid the thistle of the dreaming dragon 

we slept out on the porch in the Caribbean wind and counted 

the shooting stars across the Milky Way and the problem today 

its the same old milky way we just cant see it anymore 

but we know its there and everything so yeah I guess

 its not quite the same now as it was before 

    Ordinary speech reflects the shortest distance 

between two points a shortened and more rapid

 path to death as pointed out by Antonio Porchias 

aphorism "following straight lines shortens distances

 and also life"  So it is with the best music poetry 

and art but for those to whom the point of the journey 

never remains to arrive the song Im writing goes out

 to the far and in between of you who seek out the deeper

 plunges into the unknown requiring deeper held in breaths

 and longer lungs to relax and expand with vasodilation 

which goes hand in hand with more conscious breathing 

and learning to live a long life it comes with the price

 of your hearts desire which isnt a riddle at all 

it simply means you have to want it yourself with 

the trick being no one but you can help you stand tall  

   Once each individual figures it out they can relax and stand 

firm on their pebble weve each got our own little world at our feet 

whose scope is beyond incredible theres no end in sight to the hope 

on our horizon unlike the rippling ribbon of laurence undulating into

 a stream of mirages the hope that lies ahead like a fixed northern star 

is not an illusion by far Its a beacon of light which serves as an anchor 

a reminder of exactly why we are here It has to do with vision itself 

and our eyes the infinitesimal organs which absorb our stars light

 and refracts it through our telescopic centralized nervous system

inverting an image we process through our bicameral mind into

 an objectively three dimensional space we can sense we move 

through ourselves the ultimate first person viewpoint of reality

but this isnt a game

      Its just you whos me of course

and now we can see how it is that our identities 

may be interchanged or get mixed up and ultimately 

not really matter at all in the grander scheme of things

which begs one question to mind that it brings 

which aspect of the whole scheme has the grander design 

the microscopic filament spicules forming into Fibonacci 

spirals and expansive worlds zoomed in on within a droplet 

of teeming infusoria or the vast strewn out spiraling arms 

of galaxies seemingly scattered across a void of space 

the complexity itself balances out in the wash of the great 

equilibriums equation we might say the grand process of life

in constant development across the aeons may be rendered 

as elegant simplicity or into mind bending harrowing complexity 

depending on our perspective I don't know so let it be stated

we're just circumspeculating.