Gone Lawn
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Gone Lawn 19
Autumn, 2015

Featured painting, Invoking the Heart of the Wild by Andy Kehoe.

New Works

Alex Duensing


Among the Purpose of Dreams


It begins with calm waters, no forms or only soothing ones: shapes so familiar they beget no rippling. Behold—those horizons noting the distance without making obstacles for vision. Our primeval understanding of the term "forever."

In sleep, we recall silently what we worked so hard to know: the order of numbers; locations of heavenly bodies; those rudiments of navigation: go until ... then turn ... and go again until ... Somehow, most of the time, that alone is sufficient, and you encounter the crystalline cities you've pictured all along.

Yet... (of course, "yet")...

there comes the rising hour when sea monsters great and small clasp hands among the heaven-high waves and sing those chants, which affirm the bonds and nature of their affinity. Prepare yourself, traveler, the strange moment is upon you: Lurid colors spring forth from obscure corners of vision. Unseen shapes of fact and fable. Unchronicled exigencies wax until your response.

Prophets of old knew to befriend this...an interrupted ocean— to value it above talisman and phrase. "Preparation before prediction." Carved in the rails—and even the bowsprits. Dreams crackling as they release their troubling charge: precisely placed—(yet savage) disruption.



The Free Sutra


O! I shall elaborate, for you, in life and memory, the manifold benefits, which are conferred by your freely determined action.

For this purpose, the beginner shall choose some deed that may be performed frequently for a long while...it may even be a thing already done regularly...for, the act of creating a new habit shall not add to this work. Nor shall knowledge or ignorance of these words have bearing on the outcome. Intent is unnecessary—willful repetition an extravagance.

The time is always.

To initiate the action, the sage practitioner may choose to face beyond temporality and direction—for these are but garments upon the wise—the vase or field...around a dandelion.

From the start, one who engages in this discipline for but a moment will find...another moment in that same spot—and will be able to discern between them.

Practicing for three days causes one not to take oneself so seriously. One begins to disavow the ego with greater ease. Encounters with it become uncanny.

After three months, the same effects that occurred after three days...occur, but this time from a shift in dimension.

Four months brings laughter. Hitherto, invisible objects appear—objects that only exist when their points are composited over time.

Four months and a day shows that different time sequences produce disparate objects. A coin is manifested by fifty seconds which are the first fifty multiples of nine. A dog is made by combining every instant of sunset for three months over <name your current location>. Mathematically, these two objects shouldn't interlace, but occasionally, they do.

A year is a long while—though it occurs frequently.

After eight years, the practitioner will be able to distinguish which moments are separate in time and...which are but layers of anti-time.

Ten: a big fat hat hen. Senselessness makes sense as other parts weave in. Eleven: go to heaven...but come back soon.

After thirteen years, one has walked the breadth of existence and feels compassion for every living thing. This is when one may grant to all...that ability, which has always resided within...

When one decides...one may break the glass—to see the stars...



Sir Alex Duensing (Most Excellent Order of the Universe) is known to be the among the chief persons responsible for enabling persons everywhere to avert the Mayan Apocalypse. For more details see here.