by Shaun Lawton
the difference between their original
conception of what tomorrow would be
and their current understanding of what yesterday was
seems to be the allowance of their own personality
with all its faults and modifications so that
an honest assessment can be made of the real
value one represents to one's self insofar as
the present situation demands the general
condition of their existence to be
and whether or not it carries with it
the strange divided penalty of only
remembering the most interesting
episodes after waking up from
a temporary malady where
microseizures have cast
a static network of almost
subordinate control over every
aspect of their waking consciousness
to the point when they finally fall to sleep
in their beds it never happens at an hour when
they could best manage the continuation of total
rest due to the constant chitterings emanating from
under the crack of the closet door allowing a ghostly
green light faintly roiling with smoke and dust
penetrating the floorboards of their bedroom
to creak and groan until feeling the commotion
shiver the termite powder from the ceiling out
of the slightest cracks with a pulverized silt
comprised of every notebook and article
of clothing ever worn in the family going
so far back as to penetrate the remotest
conduits of antiquity through the severest
Scottish keeps isolated on the dotted lakes
each one a solitary tower of confinement
for an individual convict sentenced to
calcify into another skeleton embedded
within its own bricked in tomb which
remains solely as a reminder to us all
that we better watch out for what we may
inherit because even the greatest of ordinances
may amount to a paltry sum in the receding
reflections cancelled out within the eyes
of an orphaned child standing by the side
of the road holding out a dying flower.
