The Penumbra of Time

by shaun  a. lawton 

After plundering pockets of circumstance we pack our baggage 
for every hundred thousand orrerys that wobble off balance 
one sits stabilized at the center of a region so disproportionately vast
it should go without saying even the notion of exploring it is crass
in a scenario such as this it would warrant a long crumpled drag 
on a cigarette burning cooler than the embers scattered across Hell 
then flicked off into dead mist crumbling a trail of sparks behind it.

Standing on the fire escape at night with a bucket of animal bones 
time is the puzzle completed and we are the echoes still catching up
reflected in the mirror of the stars as if frozen under stadium lights 
a coliseum where the prisoners are all hidden and the warden's lost
gone off in his head in the state of Catatonia on vacation in Key West
floating in a sea of bath salts flown in under the radar over the border
landing in a corn field under moonlight in the frozen dead of night.

Memories rolled up into tubes and filed away for a never arriving day
impressions of a transcript of simulated replicas impersonating a model
casting the shadow of a reflection reproducing an archetypal effigy 
outlining the representation of a remote desolate unidentified likeness 
all the usual suspects lined up glittering near the Tannhäuser Gate
leave a long forgotten trail behind them sunken into dreams halfway erased
adrift across the gulf of the Obliterate Dust unbound into a photograph.