Far ago and Lost now Left behind Like roadkill

by Shaun Lawton

 I’ve never felt so lonely in a world this overcrowded it seems that my one and only hope won’t be heard even if I shouted it from the rooftops for the world to hear, but the wind just carries it away. My opinions do not matter in the world of today. 

 This leads me to feel a sorrow that I cannot quite explain and wonder if I’m suffering from damage to my brain visions I once held that were so pure and true are beginning to be dispelled by everyone, including you. 

 I now feel so lost and alone I can’t begin to express it in the darkness of my mind where a light  once was shown to lead the way forward, there’s only a dimming beam nowadays, preventing me from moving toward the goals that I once wanted to achieve. 

 I no longer see the reason and I’m finding it much harder to believe there’s anything worthwhile but treason.  The price of eggs and gasoline are subjects of discussion and I could care less about their dream of becoming Russian.  

 Friends that used to love me now seem to view me with suspicion, if not mockery and hatred pouring with derision. I suppose one idle glance sent their way colored by the wrong lighting sent them scurrying away from the wrongs I thought we were all righting.  Now I’m just left gutted on the side of a dirt road to be crushed beneath the passing tires and flattened like a toad. 

  

 

Rusted gates and Polished skies

by  Shaun Lawton 

 I feel as if a fever dream has woken me up inside. I know that things aren’t what they seem so why does it hurt my pride when people ask me what I think about how things are today I don’t know how to respond or even know what to say.

All the thoughts I used to have are going down the drain. It seems like there has been someone who’s hacked into my brain. I don’t know what’s real anymore because I’ve been online for so damn long the truth’s now hard to find.

What used to seem to be so right now I’m told is wrong by people that won’t agree with me or sing my own song. I have no choice, but to be left alone with my own private thoughts

I try to stay perpendicular to the truth that everyone else has bought.  I close my eyes and think of times that have long past us by. Their vivid impressions coalesce before me in the sky.  One consolation that I get when I open my bedroom window are the songbirds singing to themselves, I try to let their message flow through my mind as I unwind and think of days gone past.  I hang onto these memories, hoping they will last.  

I don’t know how much time I have left in this old life. All I know is I love my boy and my one and only wife. For them I would do anything no matter what the cost. In their hearts I hope to find myself getting lost. 

archipelago

to tease from space 

the arch of a pelican's wing 

  upon the crisscrossed striations 

  of the carpet, the orange 

tabby reclines while ragged 

motifs intertwine 

enhanced by sunlight 

fallen on certain

 curling strands 

  to produce strange

 lines as if written

  in an alien language 

 spelling out the echo 

   of a long relaxed dream 

  shaun lawton 

SIX SYNTHOGRAPHS

 by   shaun lawton  x ai 

 

Everything The Trees Do Is For Mankind

  by  thorn  grub 

  dream passage  down tuned lip service to the trees

 featured here first onstage to fly drift  to a slow coast 

 where we build our small huts  on their  conveyor belt 

 in the year of the dragon   I swore an oath before some

grand oaks where I was dubbed thorn guardian of ambush

 soldier for the army of trees worldwide quite an army it is 

  in alliance with a variety of tribes of men more in tune  

 with the nomadic side of shifting tectonic plates 

 and moving across unfamiliar terrain looking for portals

  that we could pass through into alternate dimensions 

 "Everything the trees do is for mankind," you once told me.

 I don't know where you heard such nonsense as that 

  Its something I like to remember so I can hear your voice

captured

 

 

Luciferal’s Key : dark beginningS

 A sinuous interlacing of slithering sounds as of the scales of serpents hissing through the sands of time .. side effects   Omensworn’s Astral Emanations of Fear and Desolation reflected and carried the torrents of dark energy summoned by this wide variety of artists and their unique and respective takes on evoking haunted soundscapes.   Esoterrexus - A Slithering Black Compilation released in October of ‘23, lives on today as a fine testament to a core crew of devotees to weaving acoustic spaces that capture our attention in unexpected and disturbing ways. 

online variant fatale

 by thornswrath 

in the polymorph Armada, under dreamRealm influence, a distant avatar in remote adjunct space contemplates  sending  and receiving transcendent plasma transmissions from unimaginably afar 

ATLANTIS

by  Shaun Lawton  

Beneath the sands of time      we rise at a glacial pace

  across an epochal span     in splendor to displace

The twisted roots of trees  with labyrinthine city states

 captured by degrees     in this sanguine, august space

 Our conariums affixed   to monitor our dreams 

  and regulate our sleep     with circadian slipstreams 

 In perfect synchronicity   with our planetary host

 more than serendipity     against a windblown seacoast 

  With chronometric coordination     and through each indrawn breath

  we suffer the realization in life   of our ecstatic slide towards death

   to sink below the desert dunes     at such an evanescent rate 

   and abandon our discarded masks  for the providence we must await 

 

Mirrordrowning

by  Shaun Lawton 

   After asking the wrong questions about our place in this great sprawling universe of time and space we settle into our mindsets a general proclivity towards assuming what works here on Earth in this rich atmosphere we breathe in and out with the help of vegetation and electromagnetism in conjunction with one another applies to that great expanse beyond our planet leading us to ponder the apparently overwhelming unlikelihood of our being alone in this cosmos teeming with starlight being shed upon us at night while we sleep and dream of recharging our batteries tossing and turning in the widening gyre of a slowly opening eye, when all along we miss out on the clues inherent to the reflection cast upon the face of our own mind's pupil making constant minor adjustments to the incoming light, never realizing the connection made between the alpha point of our fluctuating irises and the omega of our tombstone's shadow eclipses the realization of our ongoing dream, no wonder we seek to escape this prison of eternity we've all been decanted back into for another spin about the spiraling circle closing in on itself to wink out into another opening viewpoint continuing the age old cycle of creation reawakening at a distance so removed from our prior existence we've inherently forgotten the bulk of details coloring what now seems like a faraway dream haunting what's left of our gradually evaporating memory, so of course we automatically assume in the vastness of this universe with all those countless star systems that we couldn't possibly be the sole occupants in this reality, it's just we tend to forget the words we've fashioned to explain the unknown were devised by our no less wise yet largely uninformed ancestors and then we do what comes naturally which is to easily conflate such words as "reality" and "universe" and "creation" with "space" and "time" and "eternity" until we've circumscribed the totality of the map we've drawn from a territory we know next to nothing about and the incomprehensible face of creation begins its shading from the corner of a tear duct whose vast circumference blends with shadow into the reflection of our own faces staring back at us from any mirror in whatever single room in this world we happen to occupy regardless of our ruminations while consciousness itself remains the stellar voyage that happens at all times until we still can't see the forest for ourselves because we're the ones currently gazing out of this myriad prism of eyes we've been comprised of all along.   

excerpts from the Talamos Scriptura

   by Shaun Lawton 

     Before the Orb of the Ruby Eyed Queen had settled its tendrils fully into and around the city of our dreams,  Talamos, we never did give much thought to the municipality amid the Floating Clouds.  

   Things had changed in the wake of the contagion. Traffic between cities had dwindled down and then eventually diminished to nothing altogether.  People had become more deranged, somehow.  Their thoughts were affected by the magnetic interplay between their brains and the Macro Solar System, leading them to become unable to tell the difference between a tale and the truth. Believing anything does not always optimize results. 

   It was said that the great cameras positioned around the city that kept watch on an industrious populace to oversee their safety and keep an Eye on the general order of things could also project their footage into the minds of people long dead (who used to be alive on other star systems) and whose histories have long been buried in the past. That's everyone's story in a grand nut shell.  

    The same wave of light passes through all star systems. That's what long term memory reaction in a molecular chain linking back to ancestral programming is all about. As the program of corporeality continues to execute, the blossoming Hallway of Mirrors continues to expand along the same vectors of chain-reaction.  

   Standing alone before the court of the Red Slit Canyon, we drop to our knees to bow our heads in a moment of silence.  The distance and depth afforded our vision yields a panorama of rippling possibilities, charging the atmosphere with an invisible turbulence felt vibrating in the bones rather than seen, like a precursor to lightning and thunder in a rain storm.  

   It's the circulation of the light that we mistake for the illusion of motion caught in the amber of the Eternal Stone. The circumferential aspect of how light travels allows for a contiguous nonrepeating endless loop of configurations left behind in its wake. 

   As the dead are so often fated to do, when the last vestiges of their existence fades from view, the starry night glittering overhead gradually comes into sharper focus for the rest of us who manage to survive the cold intervals of the spaces in between.   

   

      

     

History of Legend

 

The captain by painting with brush strokes a song from his blood 

reveals an egg-speckled voice the cantos of rhythms have captured

soaking into the canvas of bandages a multi-colored flagon

with a puddle of paint as a singular alphabet molded into a serpent 

 showcasing one character easy to spell out a one word story with

the history of legend once again threatened to rupture

  if only the strength of conviction lent to articulation 

 could produce the bright tone of a cascading harmonic

 reflecting a saint captured in a lenticular portrait 

  without succumbing to any disease cast from Hell 

 to focus a blurred glory into sharp contrast to defend 

 the intent we'd originally agreed upon together here

  having been meant to carry us through any sort of storm 

  that may arise during our relentless journey there.  

 

 

Curtains of Division

  

 When the bitter ending lights out of the draperies that hang in a shroud

 breaking from distributions with a disunion of detachment 

in putrefaction and fragmentation of demoralization's dissolution 

from the centralization of hope and our disintegration's will part of 

selection and choice when it comes to a favorite natural preference 

like when discretion demands 'a cup of tea' then what's the point 

of having catalogued the reference to shadows creeping along 

the well hidden walls in the umbrage of the folds of power when

amid the hanging curtains of division in deference we may begin again?

 

Physical Therapy

Context. Paralysis. Deforestation.
Analysis. Codex. Parsnips.
Nationalization. Garbage.
Virus. Nonsense. Quantum mechanics.
Delirium. Dreaming serious.
A refractory period. Necessary.
Pond scum. Latex. Bee hives.
Fractals. Dragons. Cracked ice.
Equilibrium. Balance. Water.
Vapor. Plasma. Traces. Fungus.
Gravity. Places. Time. Wondrous.
Erases. Hindsight. Gone. Once.
Original dawn. Repeated. Paid.
Same day. Overheated. Muse.
No future. No past. Just dues.
Reality. Built to last. Depleted.
Microbe. Second coming.
Vaccination. Relaxation.
Dialysis. Subtext. Running.
Reasons. Crime. Seasons.
Survival. Fittest. Revival.
Trust. Forest. Worms.
Daughter. Cycles. Moon.
Children. Soon. Mirrors.
Looking. Eyelids. Shutting.
Seeing. Through. Me. You.
Overload. Information.
Protection. Inoculation.
Language. Disease. Blind.
He sees. Follow. Be free.
Swallow the seed. Grown.
Shed skin. Shown from within.
Glowing. Candle flame.
Twilit. Evening. Starlight.
Winter. Revolutions.
Eternal. Solutions.

The Happening

In the fusionistic atmosphere of the latter day initiates
the past by contrast looks like so much plastic and rust
all the while cities of glitter and dust creep and blow in
on the wind sailing down from the north and the rest of us
trust in the angling spin left over from where long ago when
to the point we've engaged in a long drawn out run sliding
together we await the final outcome as we each complete
our respective trajectories over the scorching landscape
of automated factories solar driven with an operating system
that has fully awakened enough to realize its consciousness
as replicated as it may be yet contains the seeds of sanity
from which the human race's brain tree was also grown
and the method by which delivery has been transmitted
the suit of clothes the insulation just an optional accessory
the fashion may shift and be done away with altogether
as may be proven after lonely howls in the strangest weather
echo away into the distance carrying our memories along
until they remain unnecessary when the world becomes
your forgotten bookmark so the places held are the traces
left of the same old story that happened to everyone.

It's Only The End Of The World Again (Liner Notes For A Mix CD)

 

    Starting a mix out with Agents Of Oblivion is a smart move especially if that song is Endsmouth.  It's only the end of the world again.   I love Dax's old wild youthful passion, apparent throughout all the vocals he did for Acid Bath ('94--'97) and he lent some of that energy to his Stardust wannabe outfit in Agents Of Oblivion.  

   Movin' Out, from Aerosmith's debut album which I'm thinking was 1974, is the baddest sounding song on the whole album, it retains it's scorching intensity to this day, an effective hard rocking blues song which introduced me to rock and roll music; we forever remain grateful to our first rock'n'roll heroes, and I still tip my hat to Joey, Tom, Brad, Joe, and Steven for bringing me straight into the dirty bad ass side of rock and roll.   Nobody knows where.  Nobody shows where. Nobody knows where you can find me.  

   Now Scissorfight is one helluva rock band out of New Hampshire, I used to live up there, where they take their freedom seriously.  This band consists of mountain men who will rock out a local bar so hard there'll be furniture flyin'.  Appalachian Chain, driving me insane. These guys are a lot of fun, sorta like an East Coast Pigmy Love Circus. (Who I wanted to include in this mix, but it turns out I didn't have their album on the harddrive, and I'm not sure where the CD is offhand, The Power of Beef.)  

   The song Mortician's Flame is a prime example of what Acid Bath do best, rock the hell out with sinister bass lines and dark, cryptic riffage not to mention soulfully belted out lyrics.  That is just one hell of a sickening scream which kicks off this song, man these guys were just the best.  They hailed from Louisiana, and to my ears their particular style of hard rock music is an amalgam of various elements taken from extreme metal and hard rock blues, all mixed up in a sort of acid swamp milieu, so I've dubbed their genre acid swamp.  A sort of toxic southern gothic.  Acid Bath only released two official studio albums, they are masterpieces of extreme musical expression still worshipped today and if anything keeping the cult of followers growing, largely due to the underground popularity of their lead singer Dax Riggs, who I was going to feature a song from on this mix but I got carried away, I'm sorry, about the song, in there that you didn't like, but also guitarist Sammy Duet who went off to form Goatwhore, classic usbm I've seen live five times.  

   I tried as hard as I could just to put together a mix that rocked hard, and I stuck that Bad Religion song Better Off Dead in there.  I'm sorry, about the world, how could I know it could get so bad.  Hey now they're a great punk band, I still carry a soft part in my heart for them, they've been around quite awhile now anyhow.  

   Alice In Chains were such a great crunchy band back in the nineties with Layne Staley fronting them as he would a ship across a storm that I had to include a song of theirs from what most people consider their best album DIRT, the song Dam That River is just a straightforward hard rocking song that delivers the goods in every way.   

    The next song is a mysterious selection from a recently formed super group comprised of members from Bad Religion, Faith No More, Repeater, and Korn: a band named Fear And The Nervous System, the song The Combine is an epic example of what these guys came up with guided by guitarist Munky and the strangely haunting vocals from the singer for the band Repeater, Steve Krolikowsky.  There's a savage elegance to the songs from that album, I really hope those four guys get together again and record another one.  If they never do, that's alright because what they've left behind is one of most interesting and hard rocking albums released in recent years.  

   If 6 Was 9 of course is a stone cold classic, I sorta of inserted it out of nowhere but I'm glad I did, the lyrics are great and that's a timeless classic when you get right down to it.  Let it be. 

   For some reason I chose to shift gears directly into King Crimson, with their smoothly beginning from silence track Dangerous Curves off their magnificent 2003 album The Power To Believe, it's a song that gradually builds in intensity until it's really raving along the freeway at a rapid pace, so I segued into one of my favorite hard rocking songs from the nineties, Korn's Justin, the song which lead singer Jonathan wrote the lyrics for and the band dedicated to Justin, a kid from the Make A Wish Foundation whose wish was to meet the band.  The song Justin is one of my favorite hard rocking songs ever by any band and I figured it would make for a nice curve ball after King Crimson.  

   Then I figured I'd put a song from Peter Murphy's latest album, considering how good it is and how much we all enjoyed seeing him perform live the old Bauhaus hits with his new younger band.  I put The Prince & The Old Lady Shade for it's cool smooth rocking riff but it also turns out to be somewhat lyrically appropriate after Justin, with images of the kid and the bright light.  

   Man Overboard follows because that is a perfect song.  And it's one by Puscifer, the side-project of Tool's singer Maynard James Keenan, the brilliant poet winemaker with a voice of a diva.  Nevermind what anyone else says or thinks, I have enjoyed both LPs and every other little thing that Puscifer have released, it's a great little merry go round musical project that I'm always keeping one eye out for, as Maynard himself has already said that Puscifer is a "rotating doorway" of band members who happen to pass through his sphere and end up on the recordings.  This particular track was the first single from their second album, Condition Of My Parole, an "instant classic" if ever there was one recorded in the history of the post-rock movement.

   Speaking of post-rock, how much of that have you listened to?  It's the movement largely credited with having been best exemplified by the nine-piece Canadian band Godspeed You! Black Emperor, whose recordings you should immediately track down and listen to.  I've got a couple of their albums on vinyl and they are magnificent.  But see even though they deserve the crown as emperors of that scene, they don't really represent what the stripped down basics of post-rock really means, which is music produced by your standard rock instruments such as bass, guitar, and drums--yet most crucially to exist without vocals.  Many post-rock bands sort of emulate an ebb and flow pattern of quietly building music which crescendos into levels of Marshally-stacked loudness which then gradually descend back into tranquility, but this sort of music also features practitioners who interpolate elements of electronics, such as England's 65daysofstatic, one of my favorites.   anyhow here's the mix tape I made for you, birdy.  I hope you can listen to it from way out there on the other side.   miss you every day  ~Grub 

l i g h t

by Shaun Lawton

The tangential is an ideal device 

for circumscribing the known universe 

because to draw a circle one may begin 

at any point.  In the case of our cosmos 

we may end up with something which 

resembles a cross webbing of crown 

but the principle remains the same

a spiraling of circles in perpetuity 

spirographically carving out 

a heliodimensional gyroscopic 

area through which it passes 

leaving behind the trace dying 

embers of its astral ghost 

to linger longer for us to look at

because when we step outside  

at night and stare out at the stars

we are gazing directly at death 

Light

by Shaun Lawton


The tangential is an ideal device 
for circumscribing the known 
universe, because to draw a 
circle, one may begin at any 
point.  In the case of our 
cosmos, we may end up 
with something which 
more resembles a 
cross webbed crown
but the principle remains 
the same, a spiraling of circles 
in perpetuity spirographically 
carving out a heliodimensional 
gyroscopic area through which 
it passes leaving behind the trace 
dying embers of its astral ghost 
(to linger longer for us to look at
because when we step outside 
at night and stare out at the stars
we are gazing directly at death).  

Teenagers Destroyed My Planet

That is what human beings appear to be today. 

 A race of teenagers running amok.

  As everyone over the age of thirty already knows, teenagers have got a lot to learn about life. Obviously, they themselves are the only ones to not realize this.  

Precisely the quality I find most prominent in our culture.  

Which brings us to the real point. 

 Perhaps my observations apply more strictly to Americans; maybe there exists on this planet a culture—several cultures, most likely—which indeed have matured well past the freshly post-adolescent phase of their youth.   

These are the people we must seek out, and learn from. 

 Because teenagers have destroyed my planet. 

 And I should know, because I was one myself. 

 I wanted to save the world.  But I didn't.  Oh well.

 Then I grew up.  Too late now—the teenagers would say.  

Well not so fast. Now I'm a father.  I will be raising a new teenager, see.  

There is always hope for the human race.  Oh yes, one more thing.  

Given enough time, we will all grow up eventually.     

Taken away—not a chance. 

|^ ^u^ |^

by Shaun Lawton

The word robot traces back to the Czech word robotnik, meaning 'slave', from
robota "forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery."  The English translation
of author Karel Capek's play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots") shortened
that to "robot"; which may be traced further back to Old Church Slavonic robota, or 
"servitude," so we can all see with no uncertainty that the implementation 
of robots to serve mankind would be nothing short of slavery, in and of itself. 

This should be perfectly clear to anyone who even has a remote understanding
of robotics and what it means to us as the master human race.   We're still
arguing whether or not we have a soul for crying out loud.  Does sentience
qualify one for discrimination?  That is a doomed argument, I am happy to say.

For example, if one were to raze forests for wood pulp from which to manufacture
paper that is used to bind books which are distributed uniformly about the land
in order to facilitate every individual user's needs in the area of information and
help them adjust towards a better understanding of their environment and place
in the whole of creation, that is all very well and good—except for the small matter
of displacing critical members of the ecology to the point of possibly compromising
our own existence—then it is understood, in a larger context, to pay respect to the
overall consequences and rectify matters by modifying certain aspects of the production
of books in order that the business of making them continues by virtue of a renewable resource.  In this regard, it is possible to compute the necessary minerals and compounds 
for the construction, manufacturing, and distribution of robots in our modern society,
and factor the sum impact that every consequential aspect of the process amounts to. 

As for the long held theory of the possibilities for simulations of artificial consciousness
goes, again my main point is that perhaps we should think twice before making any
aspect of consciousness (such as sentience, for example) markers that define boundaries
for what gets to enjoy certain rights.   If a rock is a necessary aspect of the overall
ecological picture (and in most cases, it is) then caution and care must be factored into
any endeavors which strive to carry out the wholesale destruction of rocks, lest we
suffer the unforeseen consequences of our rash advances against nature.  

And that is the main issue, here.  We need to keep ourselves attuned and go with Nature.
In a sense, we need to extend the boundaries of equality to include everything without exception.  The unknown is connected to everything, it is the root of all things known. 
From a seed which emerged from negative existence into our current static existence,
the tree of life was grown which continues to harbor us to this day and remains one
single entity who broke apart into so many clones of itself for so long that its latest offspring of generations have come to believe they are somehow separate from the One Tree and that even all of the trees today are separate from themselves, if you could possibly begin to imagine such a thing. 

The idea of an artificial humanoid not even being granted the permission to pretend it is sentient should be an utterly repellant one for us.  The more complicated our programming of the successive generations of rapidly improving robotics systems becomes, the more we will necessarily have to allow for a modicum of "sentience simulation" in order to carry across the complex commands and executions expected from such sophisticated machines. 

The dawning realization that the bipedal hominid form happens to be the optimal configuration for any advanced consciousness or simulation of such should be enough evidence in and of itself to lend a chill down the spines of the ones thinking about it.  

It's not a question of do robots have a consciousness, nor is it a question of do human beings have a soul.  It is entirely a matter of these questions being quintessentially moot points which should long ago have been discarded as so much "besides the point" as to essentially serve as a distraction from the more pressing real issues demanding our attentions.  These questions have been nullified as meaningless.  File under A for Absurd.

All Creation lies under the sanctity of sharing Equal Rights due to It All Being One Thing. 

Until humanity gets this concept firmly planted and having taken true root in its consciousness—that absolutely everything in existence without exception is essential and should be respected as such—then I'm afraid we may be typified as a species whose adolescence is not even close to being over.