by shaun a. lawton
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.
